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By Juan T. Gatbonton, Editorial Consultant
Are we riding willy-nilly another wave of people
power? At the rate we seem to be routinizing what is properly a
“once-in-a-lifetime” event for any nation, we’ll never attain
the long-term stability we need to modernize our country.
But we really need not demolish the house every
time we are compelled to repair it. We can change the system bit by
bit, because our civic problems do not arise from some cultural
failing. They merely reflect structural defects in our institutions
and incentive mechanisms—specific defects we can correct
dispassionately.
Here’s my shortlist of the reforms we should
do before everything else—because changes in these specific
processes and institutions will have the widest spread effects.
Clean up the electoral process
The authors of the 1987 Charter limited the
chief executive to a single term because they didn’t trust the
electoral process enough to believe it could resist the machinations
of a seating president. (And “Hello, Garci” seemed to justify
their fears.) But it is only through their vote that citizens can
enforce accountability in their highest officials. The
no-re-election clause in effect places the president beyond the
reach of popular judgment.
“No-re-election” was a cop-out. We must face
up to the phased reforms the Mexican people managed, which enabled
them—in July 2000—to bring down the entrenched Partido
Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) after 71 years in power.
Beginning in the middle 1990s, Mexico installed
one of the most-advanced voting systems in the world. It also handed
over control of the electoral process from the Government
Secretariat to a nine-member citizens’ council. The council is
elected by the lower house of Congress: its independence is
constitutionally guaranteed. (Parties are represented by nonvoting
members.)
This Federal Electoral Institute purged
voters’ lists and set up independent oversight committees of local
electoral offices. It also sets campaign-finance limits; ensures
equal media space for presidential candidates; works with electoral
watchdog groups; and hosts foreign election observers.
Even ensuring clean elections will not
immediately rid us of our political dinosaurs. But it will open up
the political process—and attract modern-minded people to public
office.
The most important subsidiary reform must be to
strengthen our political system—to encourage the consolidation of
our electoral factions. Right now, we’ve no political grouping big
enough—unified enough—to think coherently of the national
interest. Not parties but individual politicians have become the
functional units of our political struggles for power and the perks
of office.
Awarding mainstream parties a measure of public
financing should reduce corruption and prevent the intervention of
drug lords and jueteng syndicates. Of course, public financing must
be part of thorough-going reform to stop party-switching and to make
politics program-based rather than personality-driven.
Opening up the economy
Opening up the economy I would regard as a
just-as-urgent reform—because the closed economy multiplies the
opportunities for corruption from the benefits that government
becomes in a position to bestow.
It is true that “late industrialization” of
the kind Meiji-era Japan pioneered requires a greater degree of
government direction and control than when the West industrialized
under laissez-faire capitalism.
In Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore—and then in
Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia—authoritarian rule justified
itself by imposing the stability and predictability on the political
system that investors prize.
But the weak Philippine state couldn’t prevent
interest groups from “capturing” interventionist policies for
their private benefit. So that Philippine development would have to
rely, more than the East Asian tiger-economies did, on the play of
market forces.
Opening up the economy because the state
couldn’t manage it isn’t just a counsel of despair.
Globalization more and more favors the open economy. Look at how
even the former monopolists at the PLDT are thriving under intense
competition.
Professionalize the civil service
As the first step toward a more effective State,
we must also begin to professionalize the bureaucracy. Neither the
Spaniards nor the Americans bothered to set up a colonial civil
service of the impartiality achieved by the British, the Dutch or
the French.
The most politicized in East Asia, our
bureaucracy has become a major prize of the spoils system. Within
the executive branch alone, an incoming president appoints as many
as 8,400 officials. Hence, managerial turnover is high—since
salaries at senior level are typically 60 percent below market
rates. Under these harsh conditions, the integrity of our
country’s justice system is particularly at risk.
Asking the right questions
In recent years, we Filipinos do seem to have
been going around in circles. If we learn nothing else from
experience, let us at least learn to ask the right questions.
When things are going wrong, to ask “who did
this to us?” leads only to conspiracy theories and to delusions of
persecution. But to ask, “what did we do wrong?” can at least
lead to the more positive further question: “how do we put things
right?” And it is not a “damaged culture” but a man-made
system that stifles Filipino initiative, which we must replace, with
one more equitable, one more competitive.
Notes and comment appears fortnightly.
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