|
WHEN Ric Saludo joined the government as undersecretary at the
Presidential Management Staff in 2001, I wondered if he would last.
I gave him only a year in that place others have called “the snake
pit that is Malacañang.” Ric and I had occasions to pray together
when we were both journalists in Hong Kong. And I never stopped
praying for him and his family even when we no longer saw each other
often.
Now he has been named Civil Service Commission
chairman. There have been no unusual and cruel objections to his
appointment. Some of President Arroyo’s inveterate critics think
he can’t be expected to be good because he is an appointee of
someone whose own legitimacy and trustworthiness are in question.
But that is to be expected from GMA’s enemies.
Those who know Ric Saludo will tell you that he
is a man of probity, that he has not used his Palace position to
enrich himself or get a share of any “bukol”—to borrow from
Rodolfo “Jun” Lozada’s vocabulary.
And he does not have it in him to agree that
there is a certain “acceptable level of corruption” as Lozada
and Secretary Romulo Neri do. I am convinced that if, in his Palace
jobs, he had been made to go through what Sec. Neri went through, he
would have either gone ahead and exposed the thing to the very end
or silently leave the snake pit.
Many cannot help suspecting that poor Romy Neri
stopped because he got an offer he could not refuse as in The
Godfather.
Boring GMA defender
Some of our mutual friends found Ric rather
boring every time he had to defend the Palace side in TV slugfests.
He used data to prove his point. Like a good journalist he stuck to
facts.
He might have been boring because he was
defending the indefensible. But he did so without realizing it. He
often got involved in debates about economic issues. Was RP really
growing as administration statistics said we were? When the other
side questioned his data or wanted to shift the debate to the matter
of whether such great achievements of Mrs. Arroyo praised by the
World Bank and the ADB had made poor Filipinos less poor, he would
answer with facts and show that indeed there was slight improvement
in the poverty count. Ho hum.
Apart from being a very good journalist and
editor (he wrote for Asiaweek and had risen to managing editor in
that magazine), he is also a creative writer. He is a playwright,
and a prize-winning one.
He wrote a column here at The Times for a while.
His pieces were filled with facts and data. They did not receive the
same reader response that our political columnists on both sides of
the divide get. If you want to have an excited readership you must
never veer away from the motive of “afflicting the comfortable and
comforting the afflicted.” Ric Saludo does not go by that dictum.
Making a difference
I am sure he will try his very best, as he did
at the PMS and as Secretary to the Cabinet. In both jobs he is known
to have been rigorously correct and efficient. I am glad that former
Labor Secretary and Civil Service Commission chair Patricia Sto.
Tomas, a respected figure, has been quoted by ABSCBN as saying that
Ric Saludo is “a good man, earnest about making a difference.”
Ric had to defend his boss GMA’s many
managerial appointees to the civil service against recently retired
CSC chief Karina Constantino David’s accusation that they were
mostly unqualified political types. But in media interviews
immediately after his appointment to the CSC chair, one of the
things he has been saying is that he would pay a lot of attention to
Mrs. David’s recommendations to improve the Philippine civil
service.
I lived and worked in Hong Kong for 21 years,
Ric did for about a third of that time. In the years that we were
together one of the things he, Vic Abola (of UA&P) and I often
talked about was the marvelous Hong Kong Civil Service.
We also had a chance to observe the civil
service systems of Europe. We saw how Italy could be a mess
politically—and have no governments (no ruling political party)
for weeks on end or have changes of governments every
month—without any effect on how the country was being run smoothly
enough. Thanks to the civil service.
I’m sure Ric will take those observations with
him to the CSC.
opinion@manilatimes.net
rq_bas@yahoo.com
|
