If it was initially meant to be a managing of the public perception of the government response to massive natural disasters, the scene veered instead to something else entirely.
In General Santos City last Tuesday, after the most powerful earthquake to hit the country so far this century, get-quickly-on-a-plane Public Works Secretary Vince Dizon, with a posse of national and local officials in tow, was inspecting the slightly damaged Dr. Jorge P. Royeca Hospital.
Caught on an ABS-CBN news video, Dizon, after seeing the hospital’s damaged ceilings, turned to an unidentified smug regional DPWH official and ordered him to ready funds and speed up repairs.
The nonchalant DPWH official wryly replied that he had no money. What next came out of Dizon’s mouth instantly became a classic for what’s wrong with officials with the immediate responsibility to respond to natural disasters and repair damaged public infrastructure.
“May pera ka ba? Pa-advance mo muna. May advance na magnakaw, tang***, ang ipa-advance n’yo trabaho (Do you have money? Can you advance it? There is an advance for stealing, da***it, you should advance for the work),” a peeved Dizon uttered.
Dizon’s unguarded utterance instantly raised the widespread public suspicion that local public works officials were often hesitant to do quick work without the say-so of private contractors, even if their offices had the resources and the people to do the job.
And we all know where that’s going from the scandalously corrupted flood control projects — to untold public misery and raided public treasuries.
Besides that, the scene also exposed the dark systemic, even criminal, underbelly most government bureaucrats are laboring under.
Ideally insulated from political patronage and corruption, appointments to the public service bureaucracy have become undeniably based on political allegiance rather than merit, resulting in politicized service deliveries and lesser skilled bureaucrats holding office.
This is the situation Dizon warned about a month ago when he openly wailed that his people in the provinces simply lacked common sense.
Earlier, Dizon vowed to overhaul the district and regional officials’ response to damaged roads and bridges in their areas.
Dizon said it didn’t take a lot of thought or calculations to determine if a damaged road or bridge posed a serious risk to the public — just common sense.
The technocratic Public Works boss eventually confessed that he never particularly liked local bureaucrats habitually waiting for his decision before repairing damaged roads and bridges.
He insisted the traditional ways of delaying the repair of roads and bridges were strangely absurd in the face of modern technologies.
This was an admission of sheer bureaucratic inertia, inefficiency, and foul-ups which, even in the context of natural disasters like the latest one in Mindanao, showed that the “top-down, reactive approach” to public works and disaster management was entrenched in the bureaucracy.
By focusing on post-disaster responses rather than on proactive, community-led anticipatory actions portends even more future disasters, Dizon implied.
Post-disaster responses are, of course, politically beneficial. Many largely believe voters will remember who rushed to help them in their time of despair and need.
But some reflective observers question if that conventional view still holds true for Mindanao, particularly because of the marked drive to forge a Mindanawon identity, “one that transcends historic ethnic, political, and religious divisions,” as a keen observer of Mindanao put it.
But, despite Mindanao’s palpable modernizing tendency to dismiss “the decrepit, disorganized, disunited rest of the country,” it still fails to address one major concern: Mindanao, as elsewhere in the country, still tolerates incompetent bureaucrats and dynastic local officials.
