Trust and confidence vs. competence

The issue of the lack of experience and expertise, or in short, proven competence, came up once again in the recent appointment of former Philippine National Police chief Camilo Cascolan as one of the Department of Health’s undersecretaries. It also showed that President Marcos Jr. has continued this practice of his predecessor. (To recall, his father and namesake also did that during his presidency, when he put almost all cronies to top Cabinet positions). This is his appointment of Cascolan, who obviously does not have expertise or experience in dealing with public health.

A similar appointment was true in the case of former president Rodrigo Duterte’s designation of his trusted peace advisor Carlito Galvez, also a former military general, as his “vaccine czar.” This was in addition to Galvez’s other designation as head of the National Task Force Against COVID-19.

Galvez’s appointment then also raised a lot of questions about how he will handle a huge public health crisis. It was under his watch that the anomaly of overpriced face masks and face shields happened, exploding into the forgotten P2-billion Pharmaly scandal.

Many reactions to Galvez’s appointment then were centered on how public health issues were treated as if they were national security matters. But even if COVID-19 became a serious security threat for many impoverished Filipinos, dealing with it did not need any military strategy that is generally the expertise of soldiers and police officers. The mandatory lockdowns then became like military containment strategies, like that done in many places in Mindanao at the height of martial law. The latter was deemed appropriate in stemming the growth of rebel organizations by ensuring that communities do not provide food and shelter to members of “insurgent groups” in Mindanao.

In this country, trust and confidence, rather than proven competence in a particular field have been the currency of appointing relatives and friends to a chief executive’s inner circle, and even at all levels of governance, from the barangay to the national government.

But too much obsession with trust and confidence also becomes a source of tension within the chief executive’s inner circle that will gnaw at interrelationships among its members. This is especially true when members only have the executive’s trust and confidence as their common denominator but have diverse political interests. This has already happened with the early resignations of top Cabinet positions in Mr. Marcos’ administration. It was also true early on under Duterte.

Local government units are also known to invoke trust and confidence when appointing people who become extensions of their authority. But this becomes a serious problem when huge challenges associated with their vulnerability to extreme weather events and horizontal violent conflicts arise. For example, those appointed as local disaster risk reduction management officers know next to nothing about prevention, mitigation, and prevention of the adverse consequences of both natural and human-induced disasters. But in terms of trust and confidence, they are highly qualified because they are close relatives of the local chief executive.

Governments are supposed to promote the welfare of the greater number of constituents, to ensure that communities are provided basic social services that will preserve life, rather than destroy it. People who have shown meritorious performance or expertise in public health should be at the helm of public health offices, from the barangay to the highest level of governance, like the Department of Health.

But if we have people whose main expertise is in designing and implementing campaigns to snuff out the lives of people like “Operation Tokhang” as key decision-makers of public health departments, then we might be in more dire straits ahead.

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