Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 21:32:00 07/05/2008
LOSERS AND RECYCLED NOBODIES. THESE ARE the best that President Macapagal-Arroyo has to offer the country to staff her administration. Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Caligula tried to make a senator out of a horse; the President combines Nero and Caligula by rolling out the red carpet for Vicente Sotto III, Michael Defensor, Prospero Pichay, Ralph Recto and Teresa Oreta.
The most recent appointment that comes with Cabinet rank is that of Sotto as chief of the Dangerous Drugs Board. He claims he’s qualified because he sponsored the law that created the office he now heads. That may be so, but it was his failed bid for elected office that put him on the short list for the position—as a reward for joining the President’s side. Sotto’s recycling is a clear case of the unelectable being given a portfolio by the “un-liked.” And he may be the first in an uninspiring line of returning has-beens.
Defensor, for example, was prominently put on display during the President’s early morning arrival (from her visit to the United States) and inspection of the Naia 3. Pichay, Recto and Oreta have been mentioned by Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita as “probable” additions to the Cabinet.
The ongoing Cabinet composting is being accompanied by underwhelming appointments to constitutional commissions. The most recent ones—Lucenito Tagle and Leonardo Leonida (Commission on Elections)—have lashed out at unimpressed observers, saying they should be given time to prove themselves independent. The problem is that the popular consensus is that the country doesn’t have the luxury of time.
The Comelec of today makes the Comelec of the martial law years look like a paragon of efficiency and probity; that’s why the generally acceptable appointment of Chairman Jose Melo required a supplement of impressive new commissioners. Instead, the President chose to make appointments that merely prolong the Comelec’s probation. If the probation fails to meet public expectations, what then? Restoring the credibility of our elections is one urgent undertaking in which failure shouldn’t be an option.
The best that the President’s people can say to justify the appointments is that they are within her prerogative. That sounds like the crude American joke that goes: Why does a dog lick its private parts? Because it can.
No one doubts the prerogatives of our presidents, but one measure of a chief executive is the manner by which he/she exercises presidential prerogatives. The President has the prerogative—because it is not prohibited but merely limited by law (for a period of one year from the date prospective appointees lost an election)—to hand out portfolios to any of her failed candidates. She has the prerogative to stall reform in the Comelec by installing obscure individuals who have to earn public trust, instead of being able to bank on a reservoir of goodwill that enables them to accelerate change in the electoral commission. She has the prerogative, in a word, to sacrifice statesmanship on the altar of partisan politics.
This is not the behavior of a President in a legacy mode, of a leader preparing to leave a solid legacy of good governance behind. This is the behavior of a President preparing to embark, once more, on a make-or-break campaign. Building up a massive administration war chest is, of course, necessary if the administration coalition is to survive past 2010. But we must all be keenly aware that investing in the administration’s future can only be done at the public’s expense; it limits what can be spent for the public at present.
Make no mistake: each new Cabinet appointment carries with it a corresponding reshuffle in the executive agency concerned, as the new appointee brings in a new team. This means we can all look forward to a period of renewed instability in overstretched, under-funded, already unpopular executive agencies. These offices will find themselves only able to respond to new challenges sluggishly, as their staffers adjust to new management. The supposed benefits, then, of what will be the second-longest administration in our history come October next year, are actually none. For we are merely witnessing the latest upheaval in an administration more obsessed with reinventing itself than actually instituting a stable—because long-lived—policy environment.
Copyright 2008 Philippine Daily Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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