A very much liked food security chief

Agriculture Sec. Proceso Alcala must really like his one-time congressional aide, Orlan A. Calayag. So much so that, after Calayag emigrated to the US Alcala let him go on collecting salaries from the Congress. Not only that, when Alcala made Calayag return to head the National Food Authority, he had the government pay six months’ uprooting fee. At least three other laws were violated in Alcala’s recruitment of Calayag to the NFA. But laws matter not when you like somebody very much, eh?

The post of NFA administrator became vacant in Oct. 2012 when Lito Banayo resigned. Alcala, as NFA Council chairman, named deputy administrator Ludovico Jarina officer-in-charge till Jan. 21, 2013.

On that day on Alcala’s prodding, the NFA Council elected Calayag as one of its members. It was mere formality; Alcala had gotten a presidential appointment of Calayag as such, dated Jan. 17, 2013, and effective July 1, 2012 to June 30, 2013.

Calayag’s appointment stated it was vice Banayo, who had yet to leave on Sept. 30, 2012. Also on Jan. 17, 2013, Alcala got Malacañang to certify a separate presidential approval of Calayag as NFA administrator, again vice Banayo.

Calayag had just returned to Manila a month earlier, on Dec. 19, 2012. He was an American citizen. At airport immigration, he presented US Passport No. 462971672. At once Calayag applied for dual citizenship, which the government granted on Jan. 7, 2013.

That gave him a bright future in the government service: as NFA administrator, and Council member with six months’ back wages, July-Dec. 2012 — as a US citizen. The positions also made him chairman of the Food Terminals Inc., and director of the Philippine Fisheries Development Corp.

There’s a hitch. The NFA Charter states that its administrator must be a natural-born Filipino. In becoming an American, Calayag had renounced all Filipino rights, including citizenship status. He may have reacquired dual Filipino citizenship, but not the status as natural-born. Such principle is set in Supreme Court rulings.

There’s more. In mid-2011 was enacted the GOCC (Government-Owned and -Controlled Corporations) Reform Law 1. It formed a Governance Commission to oversee the 157 GOCCs. Thence, every vacancy in a GOCC board must have three nominees. There was no such short list for the vacant post of NFA administrator-Council member. If there were, it would be nice to know how Calayag had edged out others.

In fact, Calayag filled up the Commission’s required Appointive Director Data Sheet only on July 9, 2013 — six months after appointment and a year after its effectivity.

The Governance Commission also must vet each candidate for integrity, experience, education, training and competence. Calayag’s sworn data sheet shows Philippine work experience only as Alcala’s legislative staff chief, July 2004-Aug. 2008, and operations director of the Progressive Community Ecological Service Organization, 2004. Because of the latter, the NFA press release on Calayag’s entry as administrator billed him as an “environmentalist.” Yet it was a real estate NGO in Quezon province that Alcala had used as a congressman; its acronym, a self-promoting “PROCESO”.

Calayag subsequently moved to the US, where he took on odd sales and clerical jobs, then a series of minor supervisory work. The latter earned him the accolade “management expert” in the NFA press release.

His sworn bio-data shows that he once served as “relationship manager” of a certain Keybank, Sammamish, State of Washington, Sept. 2006-Apr. 2008. Note that this overlaps for two years with his work as Congress staffer till Aug. 2008. Was Calayag one of those notorious “ghost employees” in the state payroll?

So now Alcala has a chief of the agency in charge of food security, whose suitability has not been checked. Under Alcala, Calayag’s feats so far include spikes in rice retail prices of P6 to P8 per kilo since July. These are due largely to supply instability.

Two things cause the supply mess. One, Alcala and Calayag forbid private rice importation, even at 40- to 50-percent tariff, well beyond the protectionism grace period granted by the World Trade Organization. Two, weeks into Calayag’s entry, they bought from abroad only 205,700 tons, because the NFA money ran short from, as congressmen denounce, a P400-million overprice.

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Social Security System members naturally are grumbling. Their politically appointed trustees paid themselves P1-million performance bonus each. This is in spite of countless members’ complaints of months-long delays in processing salary loans or pension checks. In spite too of daylong queuing at SSS counters just to register new employees or dependents, and to remit self-employed members’ contributions. In spite too of the SSS’ inability to jail thieving bosses who deduct workers’ monthly contributions from pay checks but do not remit these to the SSS.

In short, in the members’ eyes, the trustees deserve not a single centavo bonus for poor work. And yet, those trustees have the temerity to claim that their bonuses came not from members’ contributions but from investment profits.

The trustees forget that the SSS is a private mutual provident fund, merely administered for the members by the government. That’s why Malacañang names the trustees, and SSS staffers are under the Government Service Insurance System. The trustees must make the contributions grow — by investing these in stocks and bonds — eventually for members’ retirement pensions. So, whatever “profits” the trustees pocket come from members’ contributions that they invested. No amount of banking gobbledygook changes that fact.

Under the hated Arroyo admin, the trustees had helped themselves to the SSS’ investible funds. At one point, they lent themselves hundred-million-pesos in SSS money in order to buy and sell the SSS shares in private firms — then pocketed the multimillion-peso dividends. The Aquino admin sued them for fraud. In awarding themselves bonuses, the present trustees commit the same crime.

Malacañang and the trustees claim there’s a difference. Supposedly the bonuses were approved well beforehand, during the GOCC Governance Commission’s review of 2012-2013 SSS business plan.

Phooey! That review clearly was flawed (as flawed as the Commission’s vetting of the NFA’s Calayag). It is so for allowing the total inefficiency in all SSS offices.

Some trustees now contemplate returning the P1 million, a sign of its unfairness. Still, the Commission says nothing can be done about the bonus payments anymore. Try next year, it tells the members, since the 2013-2014 SSS business plan is presently being studied.

In short, there’s no redress for grievance for the 25 million SSS members.

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