Trial and error

Wow, Mali! This was the title of the defunct TV program starred in by popular comedian Joey de Leon that was previously aired on Channel 5. The show featured hidden cameras that caught people trapped in funny situations as well as those who figured in unintended boo-boos. A very witty writer, De Leon, by the way, also writes a regular column for The STAR entertainment section.

The TV show became the craze of the Filipino audience and its title Wow, Mali! has become a household expletive when something goes wrong. But this expression is only used if the mistake turns out to be funny and harmless.

Committing one Wow, Mali! after another may be tolerable during the first 100 days in office of the administration of President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III. In fact, even the opposition ranks are willing to give a year in office for Aquino to learn the ropes and allow a margin for errors if they fumble along the way.

It’s quite acceptable and even understandable that such Wow, Mali! mistakes come with the new territory. These are expected and is part of the usual birthing pains of any new administration.

But after five months in office, Aquino administration officials should stop the seeming trial and error method by which they try to run our government. It’s not funny anymore at this stage to commit such Wow, Mali! mistakes at the expense of our people.

In fairness, though, to the President, he has no illusion of infallibility. The Chief Executive said yesterday: “We recognize the fact that we’re all human beings and things made by human beings can be improved.” How I wish his Palace aides and Cabinet officials would closely hew with the presidential attitude. 

In his usual candor with Palace reporters, he admitted yesterday that his Palace legal team has erred in certain provisions of the Amnesty Proclamation that he signed and forwarded to the 15th Congress for their concurrence. Because of these defective provisions, the Palace was forced to withdraw the presidential Amnesty Proclamation that Congress was ready to approve en toto. The corrected draft will go back to square one of the legislative mills of both chambers of Congress.

The Palace legal team headed by Executive Secretary Paquito “Jojo” Ochoa will have to do better than having to say sorry each time such serious lapses occur. They should have learned from the first time such sorry mistake has been committed last July in the issuance of Memorandum Circular (MC) No.1 signed by Ochoa.

An over eager presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda “prematurely” released and announced to the press the first Palace directive. MC1 ordered the removal from their post of many government executives who were co-terminus with former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. However, MC1 was vaguely worded to indicate how this applied to career executive service officers (CESO) whose tenures in office are protected by laws of the land.

The very next day, the Palace had to make a quick retreat from the previous announcement by Lacierda who clarified that what he gave to the press was supposedly just a “draft.” A revised MC1 gave affected Arroyo appointees until Oct. 31, 2010 to pack up their things and leave their offices.

What the Palace bright boys failed to realize was that it was not easy to fill up as much as 1,500 vacancies.

This faulty amnesty proclamation was the latest blunder that came about after the controversial launching of the Pilipinas, Kay Ganda tourism promotion campaign by the Department of Tourism (DOT). After initially defending his agency’s big-time boo-boo, DOT Secretary Alberto Lim grudgingly admitted the program was prematurely launched last week.

The new campaign slogan and logo were supposed to phase out the Wow, Philippines! that our country’s tourism promotion program has been using for the past nine years already. At the height of the furor against the new country brand that DOT has proposed to adopt, I heard an interview of the DOT Secretary on his explanation why they wanted to discontinue using Wow, Philippines! as our country brand. He said potential tourists in Germany mispronounced it as “VOV, Philippines.” This is because the letter “w” in the German alphabet is pronounced as “v.” I don’t think Lim was joking when he said it.

Then the worse came out. Netcitizens found out that the new DOT logo appeared to be a copycat from Poland’s. It was a good thing that President Aquino suggested some improvements in the logo by adding a tarsier and a “smiling” coconut tree in the logo to give it the local Philippine colors.

But a smart aleck remarked: “But tarsiers don’t climb coconut trees. They live and thrive on eucalyptus trees.” Still, Wow, Mali!

While the embattled DOT Secretary was trying to salvage the situation, everyone else who had something to do with it, including the ad agency commissioned to do the new tourism campaign slogan and motto, have washed their hands off. They blamed their client, the DOT, for not heeding their advice that it is still subject for test-runs. The local and foreign stakeholders of the DOT complained in unison, which is unusual — they were not consulted at all.

As one popular saying goes, success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.

Finally yesterday, the brains behind the flubbed DOT promotion campaign, Undersecretary Vicente “Enteng” Romano III, offered to resign. While Romano may have helped a lot during the campaign in the last May 10 presidential elections through his social networking skills and talents, President Aquino had no choice but to promptly accept it.  

These were the latest in a string of blunders so far chalked up under the new administration which is obviously still groping its way. The learning curve is dangerously getting longer instead of shorter.

The Wow, Mali! Expression could very well be the words of caution that the Chief Executive could issue to the men and women of his administration. A complete staff work may have done the trick and a lot of consultations and consensus-building could have helped them detect potential trouble spots. 

The time for trial and error is over. However, it would be asking too much to be error-free. But doing their homework more diligently can get the error-prone Aquino administration officials to run this government out of trouble.