The time is ripe to fix the government bureaucracy!

Quite lately, we been mentioning about the group who has been helping many women in Cebu, they're called the Lihok Pilipina Foundation, Inc. founded by a dear friend, Mrs. Tessie Fernandez. I'm glad that her group isn't just helping individual women in distress, they're also eyeing our government, which is also in distress. Indeed, through the Lihok Pilipina survey, they found many things wrong with most government offices, things that you and I already know, a bureaucracy that we should have outgrown a long time ago but no one bothered to go out of their way to find solutions to fix these problems. Perhaps we need a "mother's touch" to do some house cleaning in this government.

I submit that I've concentrated too much on changing our system of government because indeed only Imperial Manila has largely benefited from this present system, while the rest of the provinces and cities in this country are falling far behind this socio-economic development. I'm glad that finally, there's a group belonging to the Regional Development Council (RDC-7) who's brave enough to tell it as it is!

One of the agencies that Lihok Pilipina looked into is the Land Transportation Office (LTO), where despite a huge sign that declares, "No Fixers Allowed" many fixers make a decent living by doing exactly that - fixing things for someone for a fee. Thanks to the bureaucracy of government, it has spawned fixers! So what are we to do with this problem? Do we need to change the constitution to rid the LTO of fixers?

Don't think that fixers are the only problems plaguing the LTO. Perhaps the bigger problem is hellooow, surely by now you know that there's no parking space for motorists who have violated traffic rules and need to go to the LTO to pay their traffic fines or deal with the fixers? These are just a few of the problems plaguing the LTO. It is time to bring this out so that the undersecretaries of the LTO would find solutions to those problems. As analysts would say, it is time for an "out of the box" solution to these problems.

Perhaps for the LTO, the best solution is the one that our good friend Al Aboitiz of the Visayan Electric Company (VECO) did a little over a year ago. He moved the VECO payment or collection office to the most accessible place in SM and voila! VECO consumers can no longer find any excuse for failing to pay their electric bills except that they don't have the money to pay their bills. If the LTO moved to a better place complete with parking then people can find it more convenient to personally go and pay their violations, instead of dealing with fixers. This is an example of a simple, but "out of the box" solution to this problem.

Let me point out that this was one of my plans when I was chairman of the Cebu City Traffic Operations and Management (CITOM) and I'm not ashamed to admit that this was one of the things we learned when CITOM officials had an official visit to the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) under Chairman Bayani Fernando. Yes, their collection office looked more like a bank than a traffic violations office. Fernando told us that, this is how government should treat those who are giving money to our treasury! Unfortunately, when I quit CITOM, no one cared to finish what we've planned, to make CITOM serve Cebuanos better.

Indeed, it's about time that we taxpayers started howling and demand for better service. For too long, the government offices were filled by political friends and relatives, which resulted only in very poor government service. So we must do something drastic and no, it is not to change the constitution.

One quick fix solution is what was suggested by Cebu's 1st District Rep. Eduardo Gullas who said that government should seriously consider eventually assigning non-core, back office operations to private business process outsourcing (BPO) providers, which is the current trend in private business, which allows for high productivity and efficiency. Gullas said, "Of the P1.04-trillion proposed 2006 budget, nearly 32 percent or P330.5 billion would be used to pay for the salaries and benefits of 980,000 government employees". So are we ready for BPOs to improve and streamline government bureaucracy? I certainly hope so.

Local government units can learn or practice this with the garbage collection system where in many countries it is already privatized. If this basic governmental service is privatized, you can see more efficiency in our garbage collection system. But the problem really is not that we cannot find examples of how this is done in other countries, it is the lack of political will to usher changes that promote better services to the people.

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