Setting the example

When the Commission on Appointments (CA) bypassed Cabinet members two or three times during the first Aquino presidency, Corazon Aquino withdrew the nomination.

In the previous administration, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo simply reappointed, over and over, officials bypassed by the CA, or else moved them to another department.

When the CA repeatedly bypassed P-Noy’s nominee as ambassador to Beijing, the President dropped the nominee, then appointed him as one of two “special envoys” to the same country.

Domingo Lee and Cesar Zalamea are supposedly tasked to bring in Chinese tourists and investors. Tourism and investment are two areas now specifically affected by the Philippines’ row with China over Panatag or Scarborough Shoal. Damage control should be handled by a regular ambassador with clear functions and an unassailable mandate from both Malacañang and Congress.

Yesterday, a senator challenged Lee, who could not explain what the United Nations Convention on the Law of Sea was when he faced the CA, to spell “Scarborough.”

Perhaps P-Noy feels he needs his handpicked guys ASAP in Beijing, as local business groups nag him about unsold bananas and canceled tour packages.

Even the Shanghai Ballet sent word last Thursday that it was putting on hold a planned staging of one of its choreographies, “The Butterfly Lovers,” at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. The CCP’s resident dance company, Ballet Philippines (BP), had invited the Shanghai Ballet to perform in Manila in July as part of BP’s season gala. Two dancers from the Shanghai Ballet would have performed together with BP dancers.

An assistant to Shanghai Ballet artistic director Xin Lili, in a phone conversation, told BP they were “very busy,” but later admitted that they were no longer keen on the Manila performance “because of many things happening between our countries” and they were on a “wait-and-see” mode.

That could be the prevailing mood in other sectors in China as well. The cultural exchange project was supposed to be in observance of the 2012-2013 years of friendly exchange between the two countries, as declared by President Aquino and his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao during P-Noy’s state visit to China in August last year.

I’m not sure it’s a good idea to send two special envoys rather than a regular ambassador to Beijing, especially at this time. The quality of diplomatic representation is often regarded as a reflection of the level of importance attached by the diplomat’s government to ties with the host nation. Our embassy in Beijing has been without an ambassador since P-Noy recalled all political appointees of GMA shortly after he assumed the presidency nearly two years ago.

Apart from this, the appointment of Lee to a posting that Congress refused to go along with smacks of an attempt to go around the requirement for CA confirmation. The requirement is part of the system of checks and balances in a democracy.

Admittedly, the system has been undermined in the past by shakedown artists in the CA. But the system is an integral element in a functioning democracy, and the government of daang matuwid should try to make the system work instead of going around it.

P-Noy is expected to set the example.

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Critics continue to scoff at daang matuwid and cite the activities of P-Noy’s so called KKK – or kaibigan, kaklase at kabarilan – to stress their point.

In several cases, the criticisms appear to be valid. P-Noy needs to keep a tighter rein on some of his trusted lieutenants.

But regular surveys, the stock market’s performance and improvements in the country’s credit standing indicate that P-Noy’s administration continues to enjoy a generally positive image.

Several officials of multilateral institutions and foreign governments have told me that while corruption in fact remains deeply rooted not just in the bureaucracy but in Philippine culture, it helps to have a leadership committed to fighting the problem.

Some of the officials, including several of P-Noy’s admirers, have started voicing concern that he could be obsessive in his fight, at the expense of many other priorities. But at this point, the officials are still generally bullish on the Philippines.

During his watch, P-Noy should be able to bring the anti-corruption campaign down to the lowest rungs of the bureaucracy by simplifying procedures and cutting red tape. This eliminates the temptation to resort to fixers, to pay grease money to speed up the processing of transactions.

A study conducted by the National Statistics Office showed that of the 10 percent of Filipinos who pay grease money to facilitate transactions with the government, 75 percent do so voluntarily. Cutting red tape would reduce the temptation to offer bribes.

Technology can promote transparency and reduce corruption. Government agencies, including local government offices, should be required to post all their budget proposals, supply requisitions and actual purchases (to include the items, volume, prices and suppliers with addresses or contact numbers) online. Such detailed reports are prepared anyway, so the only additional work this would entail is uploading the information for easy public access and verification.

The Commission on Audit should rotate its personnel more frequently. As recent congressional probes have shown, many large-scale anomalies were abetted by the incompetence or collusion of COA resident auditors.

A competent, honest resident auditor, for example, should be able to easily detect when big-ticket procurement projects in a particular agency are being broken up into smaller ones to evade auditing rules. This is supposed to be the new M.O. of crooks in P-Noy’s administration. The auditor should then have the courage, and a strong sense of civic duty, to alert anti-graft investigators.

With Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales enjoying a credible reputation, the government can invest in hiring more lawyers and providing other resources for the office that is at the forefront of the anti-corruption campaign.

Perhaps by noon of June 30, 2016, enough progress in terms of good governance would have been achieved for people to declare that P-Noy managed to actually make a difference.

Much will depend on top officials setting the example in every government agency.