Political ‘theater of the absurd’
Our bureaucrats generally tend to cross boundaries in terms of function, the scope of authority, and institutional mandate.
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Our bureaucrats generally tend to cross boundaries in terms of function, the scope of authority, and institutional mandate.
When feisty politicians grandstand, it strikes a populist cord that instantly acquires adherence to their worldview and they encapsulate this into a fairly acceptable policy agenda. Likewise, when bureaucrats perform their jobs ahead of themselves, things tend to spiral out of control and their overreaching roles transcend established parameters.
Let's roll out instances when this inter-locking assumption is in play, to wit:
When 31 million chose BBM over its arch-rival in the May polls, people did so on a strong belief that he would make the better leader who will advance the public interest, above all else. It follows that in turn, now President BBM is expected to choose the cream of the crop to head core departments, crucial commissions, critical agencies, and bureaus in a bloated bureaucracy.
Are their appointments based along disciplinary lines since political patronage would prove a poor barometer if one has set solid benchmarks of performance? It's discomforting to learn that one already appointed NTC chief would head the CoA instead; along with a prized 7-year term. It's hard to imagine that "bureaucratic interoperability" is at work here (i.e. expertise in telecommunications and the auditing field) because it would be like playing two odd musical instruments at the same time or akin to comparing apples with oranges.
Bureaucrats at the level of line department secretaries just cannot be left to their own devices sans wisdom from above. To do so results in many discordant voices — a dissonance that disrupts the smooth delivery of goods and services — on what the government does or does not do. Our bureaucrats generally tend to cross boundaries in terms of function, the scope of authority, and institutional mandate.
For instance, for a senator to act as a politician at the same time as a bureaucrat tends to inherently bring about a degree of confusion in desired governance outcomes. This makes us ask whether elective office takes higher precedence than a merely appointive one.
The case of an elected congressman appointed to become the justice secretary is certainly cut from the same cloth. Now caught in the storm of unexpected political events, it begs reflection on whether he would have made the better choice, since, if mounting pressures might soon cause his resignation, the good secretary has no position to fall back on. The trade-off proved cruel.
For another, it's clearly off-the-wall for a former chief justice of the Supreme Court to find himself performing as an executive secretary who normally has to explain before the press anything they want to ask about. Clearly, he cannot descend from his Ivory Tower to foreground a respectable response to even the simplest question without being "territorial" about it.
It's interesting to mention that one can be a politician and wears the appropriate hat and can be a bureaucrat and wears another. This comes picture-perfect in the case of the vice-president who concurrently is the education secretary yet in all fairness organized her roles in the larger command-and-control chain.
How about the office of primary responsibility on matters with national security? With one not known to be a "pracademic" to be in charge of a delicate task — a third of which military; another third, diplomacy; the last third, parliamentary — how should the old lady fare well in this trifecta of large domains and hardline actors?
Then again, the interior and local government secretary only made himself a fair game to criticism not so much for going beyond his scope of authority any more than the inability to delegate the same to a subordinate officer reposed such a specific mandate. Before a viewing universe, there's danger in presenting a confessed "killer" as a mechanism to extract raw information of a named "middleman" whose untimely death in prison a few hours after revelation consequently ripened suspicion.
Paraphrasing Shakespeare — "Whereto tends all this?"
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