By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
Some problems, though small, are never solved because they had been there for a long time and people got used to them. They have become sort of normal.
Then we recall a statement of Eddie Garcia who passed away a few days ago regarding women. He said something about 50 years ago to the effect that “Kung yong nakikita di inaayos, di lalo an yong di nakikita” (If what is being seen by the public is not being taken care of, more so those that are not being seen).
Is that also true with respect to governance?
Take, for instance, traffic. There are so many small contributory factors which are right there before our very eyes, and yet nothing is being done about them. Wrong parking, double parking, wrong parking policies or rules, lack of effective punishment for violators, etc., are some of these. Were these problems ever solved? No. All attempts, or most of them, the past years in Baguio City were failures.
Then there was the truck ban. As if there is no truck ban in the city. You would see big trucks passing through the city’s main streets and yet they are not being caught. They even pass through several police stations, yet nothing happens to them.
There is also the lack of directions for tourists who are not so familiar on the city’s routes. How about tourist information centers? We don’t have enough of these in critical areas. These would be OK for ordinary cities, but not for a Summer Capital. The city is far from being a tourist friendly city. So what was the city’s tourism officer doing? Same thing with the regional officers of the Department of Tourism. The local and regional tourism officers should have been working together to make the city an ideal place for tourists but I don’t see any effect of such efforts, if there ever was any.
What do all these reveal about the unseen parts of governance? Perhaps the leadership in the city was somehow too lenient to wield the whip on subordinates to function more efficiently. Or was the leadership held hostage by traditional bureaucratic laziness among the ranks. Not just laziness. Lack of creativity might be one of these, which is always expected in any Philippine government hierarchy.
Another thing is the lack of a monitoring process to really find out the small problems causing inconvenience or suffering among us, the small people. In many instances, leaders are too comfortable in their ivory towers that they forget to monitor the effects of policies which are often good but don’t result in such due to faulty implementation.
When leaders just rely on the feedback of subordinates, they would find out many years later that they were being fed the wrong information to cover up the incompetence of subordinates.
The effects of all of these usually surface in an in-your-face manner, when voters don’t anymore vote for the politicians they had been voting for in the past. There is always a limit. People get tired when they see their leader being sweet talked by those who are near him but do not exert enough effort to find out what his loyal followers want from him.
As Peter Drucker, the management guru, once said, “don’t guess what the customers want.” He meant that these things must be ascertained by the manager through scientific ways.
Who are the customers of politicians? The voters.
Will the new political leaders in various positions repeat the foregoing mistakes? Yes, they will. When they become comfortable where they seat. And they always do.
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