Mr. President, shape up!

In the context of contemporary life, the state consists largely of politicians and bureaucrats. Owing to the inability of the Civil Service Commission to operationalize meritocracy in the government service, aggravated by the absence of an anti-dynasty law to effect structural reforms, chronic nepotism characterizes the working environment at all levels of government. 

In the course of time, political elites realize that there are two doors open to them, namely, elective and/or appointive positions, thanks to the status quo’s liberal scheme of interoperability. Thus, former Politicians X, Y, Z could be Bureaucrats 1,2,3, respectively and vice versa. In other words, political elites can game the system to their comparative advantage.

In fact, broad-spectrum nepotism accounts for the perpetuity of corruption in the entire bureaucracy.  In the municipal or city as well as provincial governments, there are appointive officials as there are elective ones. 

In a lot of cases, patronage politics always leaves its “fingerprints” in these government offices, especially at the top of the hierarchy. Although on its own, the military establishment is a classic management model, again, without patronage, to rise to flag or star rank would be a tad difficult. 

There’s hardly any agency or office that could rightly claim to be an equal opportunity employer and whatever guidelines appear to be in place is a case of “obedezco pero no cumplo” (I obey but I do not comply) by the appointing authority. 

In the mid-November mass movements, the buzzwords centered around cries for transparency and accountability. Upping the emotional voltage of this public outrage are the damaging revelations of Sen. Imee Marcos about her brother-president, not to mention the confession of ex-Rep. Zaldy Co, former chair of the House Committee on Appropriations, implicating not only ex-Speaker Martin Romualdez but no less than President FM Jr. himself. 

The powers-that-be were so quick to dismiss the disclosures as mere hearsay, devoid of probative value, allegations the Palace could readily belie. Officialdom’s ability to “turn troubles into bubbles” just cannot be underestimated as it unabashedly does so at every turn a crisis emerges. Not a few times, the President just threw caution to the wind, or why indeed should he be bothered? Who would dare shoot the messenger in the person of the highest official of the land?

Speaking of transparency, the online randomized survey experiment conducted in Argentina had these findings, viz: “They show that providing information to citizens matters for shaping perceptions about transparency, and the content of that information matters for affecting the evaluation people make about the government.” 

The evidence highlights that transparency and trust must necessarily be mediated by the performance of the government (Alessandro et al., 2021).  Furthermore, Parindingan et al. (2024) contended that when “transparency and accountability are well-established, public trust in government will increase.” 

This then creates an atmosphere conducive to collaboration rather than destabilization by various quarters of the body polity. Something ought to encourage active involvement in the development process. How so in an environment that has already lent itself to looting, pillage, grand-scale corruption by both politicians and bureaucrats in wanton abandon?

And what are included in the menu of transparency and accountability? Lets name seven very quickly, viz: 1) right to information as the right to know; 2) public accountability as the obligation to justify action; 3) rule of law as preventing abuse of power; 4) citizen participation as active engagement in the policy process, marked by debate and scrutiny; 5) proactive disclosure as routine and systematic publication of data and information; 6) independent oversight as the presence of independent bodies monitoring government actions; and 7) ethical standards and integrity as avoiding conflicts of interest and disclosing corruption. 

Underperformance presumably slipped through the cracks that have now made the government fragile, vulnerable and in a state of decay. When the official acts of a president show typical patterns of shifting the blame, the penultimate question would be “where to from here?”

Mr. President, it’s the bottom of the ninth — shape up!