Job-creator

Again, Edwin Lacierda failed to put the most politically profitable spin on the President’s utterances.

When his boss arrived from an uneventful state visit to Thailand, he delivered a surprising set of announcements — all of which are totally unrelated to the trip. He announced he would retain the incumbent DENR secretary and appoint disappointed jobseeker Neric Acosta to some sort of advisory job at the Palace — with Cabinet rank.

Lacierda’s boss tickled our curiosity even more. He said he was going to fire someone with Cabinet rank — but appoint the same to another job within the presidential ambit. Speculation has centered on Ricky Carandang, whose functions in the overpopulated “communications group” remains a mystery to many.

Meanwhile, the President announced, Executive Secretary Ochoa is meeting with defeated candidate Mar Roxas to define the parameters of the new Office of the Presidential Chief of Staff (also of Cabinet rank). If it is taking too long to define the functions of that post, maybe the post in unnecessary. Taxpayers may be spared the burden of underwriting a desk and a separate staff at the Office of the President whose actual role the appointing authority himself has difficulty discerning.

I saw Mar on the golf course some weeks ago. He described himself as “unemployed” — as are 27% of Filipinos. He should not worry: the President of the Republic no less is his employment agent.

In addition to Mar and Neric, the Liberal Party announced they had thrust onto the President a list of thirty or so defeated candidates from the last election hoping to be appointed to this or that. I suppose, the President of the Republic is now considered their employment agent too. Keep the party happy.

Lacierda missed a beat and failed to prove himself worthy of his pound of salt. He should have announced the President has his nose to the wheel, working very hard to create jobs for the unemployed. The appointments to be made over the next few days will be significant in reducing the nation’s alarming unemployment rate.

Yes, he should have said, there is a reshuffle going on. But the reshuffle is not leading to anyone getting shuffled out. Those who are fired from their current posts are immediately rehired one way or another.

In short, the reshuffle is not adding to the unemployment rate. That unemployment rate we now confront approximates Egypt’s. We saw what happened in that misgoverned country when throngs of unemployed young people encountered Facebook.

We too have an inordinately large number of citizens who are young, unemployed and on Facebook. Carandang’s “strategic messaging” office failed to figure out what to do with them.

Perhaps the President has stumbled upon the solution: hire all of them to join what is already the most populous Cabinet in our history.

Inefficient

The other thing the President talked about upon his voluntary repatriation was the PLDT-Digitel merger.

Well, to be fair, he did not really talk about it. He simply said he is in receipt of a voluminous report (about half an inch thick) from groups opposed to the merger.

Since there were many “technical aspects” in that report, he (as usual) passed it on to the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) and the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) for further review.

He might have meant the Department of Transport and Communications (DOTC) and not the DOST. The DOST does our meteorology and volcanology, not our information technology. But the DOTC, despite that department’s name, has shown very little interest (and very little competence) in communications. Maybe the President should have assigned the matter to his overstaffed “communications group” since this band of co-equal secretaries does not (by the President’s own assessment) do enough work anyway.

At any rate, the President remembered that he “learned in school that monopolies are inefficient.” He must have been absent the next day when the lesson was: Two Competitors Does Not a Monopoly Make. He must also have been absent the third day when the lesson was on Natural Monopolies such as Meralco and the NFA.

And what did the President learn about “monopolies’? Further to the PLDT-Digitel merger, the President said that the frequencies used by the now merged communications companies were “adjacent” to each other, giving them “undue advantage”.

Again, he must have misspoke. He must have meant “efficiency” instead of “undue advantage.” Efficiency could hardly be confused with “monopoly.” Efficiency brings down costs and benefits all consumers.

In the telecoms sector, efficiency is measured by the number of consumers served by the amount of radio bandwidth granted the franchise.

PLDT-Smart has a total of 113MHz of radio spectrum serving 45.6 million subscribers. Globe has 90 MHz serving 26.5 million subscribers. Sun has 42.5 MHz serving 14 million subscribers.

This translates into pretty revealing operator efficiency by dividing the bandwidth allocation by the number of subscribers. Smart has 403,000 subscribers per MHz, Sun has 330,000 and Globe only 294,000. Yet it is Globe demanding that government allot more spectrum to it, away from Smart and Sun.

Bandwidth is finite; the number of potential subscribers infinite. Should government now reallocate more bandwidth to the most inefficient user in the name of some windmill called “monopoly’? All consumers should be interested in greater efficiency and lower costs.

The President does not need the “DOST” to grasp that — nor dig up his college notes.