‘Tamang daan’

Last week, I asserted that certain all-too-common excuses for government failures or outright misdeeds have become little more than convenient cop-outs, to wit: “We don’t have enough budget,” “It’s not my responsibility,” “We can’t act until prior problems are solved first,” “Some sectors will be hurt,” and “It’s a political demolition job.” Granting that all these are lame excuses, what is the right way (“tamang daan”), then, for government to overcome its seemingly perennial shortcomings?

Not too long ago, government was under fire for alleged improper realignment, under the Disbursement Acceleration Program, of substantial savings to address identified pressing needs. The very presence of large savings already suggests that government is far from cash-strapped. A large part of the surplus funds apparently arises out of the current administration’s efforts to plug erstwhile leakages due to corruption. The truth is, most government implementing agencies have always had a problem with “absorptive capacity,” or the ability to fully absorb their allotted budgets in the sense of spending them for their intended uses. Even in the 1990s when budgets were generally considered tight, my staff at the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) would report that by the end of November, government agencies typically would have spent only around 75 percent of their annual budget allocations (and even less of their foreign-assisted project budgets). This consistently led them to find ways to spend money quickly in the final month, mostly by realigning them into creative bonuses and allowances for employees (although one can’t discount that this was all done deliberately).

Financial reports filed by local government units (LGUs) at the Bureau of Local Government Finance over the years similarly show that—believe it or not—most LGUs consistently report substantial surpluses year after year. In a 2006 study of 16 provinces’ performance on the Millennium Development Goals (to cut poverty in half by 2015), a team from think tank Brain Trust Inc. found that their reported surpluses reached up to P637 million in 2004! “These high levels of budget surplus indicate that it is not entirely correct to attribute the difficulty of meeting the MDG targets to lack of resources…. The problem may lie more in weak management of resources and inappropriate priorities,” the study surmised.

The above suggest to me that whether then or now, lack of budget has never been a very good excuse. I submit that more often than not, the real issue is government inadequacies in planning and project development. We all have our own bright ideas on what our pressing needs are and how to address them, but turning these ideas into concrete fundable interventions—that is, well-defined projects—is not a skill one readily finds in government. In the Ramos administration, I sought to address this gap at the regional and local levels by having each Neda Regional Office set up a Project Development Assistance Center (PDAC). The idea was for the PDACs to assist LGUs, lawmakers, and even nongovernment organizations turn their project ideas into viable project proposals that donor agencies or the national government could then evaluate and line up for funding. The long delay in pushing this administration’s public-private partnership projects into actual execution suggests that implementing agencies need to invest in stronger in-house capacity for project development. This includes project formulation; preparing technical specifications, financial estimates and analyses, and feasibility studies; and writing good project documents/proposals.

Meanwhile, the time for finger-pointing and waiting for someone else to act on many of our persistent problems is over. Name it: job creation, agriculture and rural development, tourism promotion, power cost reduction, easing traffic congestion, affordable housing, disaster rehabilitation, Bangsamoro development and many more—addressing them effectively will inevitably require joint actions from multiple government entities. Without good interagency coordination and collaboration orchestrated by an effective leader among them, nothing will move. In the 1990s, I found out that the Neda belonged to 443 interagency coordinative bodies of different kinds, given President Ramos’ penchant for creating councils, committees and task forces to tackle every key concern. Sure, it cost us in his Cabinet an inordinate amount of time spent in coordinative meetings; but in hindsight, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. It worked well to ensure that the unity, solidarity and teamwork (UST) that Ramos constantly preached was put into real practice—and government constantly moved forward in sure, steady steps.

And then there’s the constituency for reform. Everybody recognizes the need to achieve inclusive growth, not an oligarchy-strengthening one that Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow recently expressed concern about in the US context. Our maxim should be the greatest good for the greatest number, and our policy choices ought to be toward those that yield widest benefits. Clearly, it doesn’t make good public policy to serve the interests of a favored few over that of the wide majority of citizens. But time and again, realpolitik has led us to policies that do just that. Only by institutionalizing wider citizen participation in governance and policymaking can we counter that.

Yes, taking the “matuwid  na  daan” is critically important. But we must make sure that as we do so, we traverse the “tamang  daan” as well.

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