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By Juan T. Gatbonton , Editorial
Consultant
Like the grasshopper in the
fable, we Filipinos live in the present—heedless of tomorrow’s
consequences of today’s neglect. We treat the surface symptoms of
our basic problems, instead of facing up to their root causes.
Consider, for instance, the
magnitude of our neglect of basic education. Thailand spends six
times more than we do on every schoolchild; Malaysia spends 10 times
more.
In 2006 to 2007, our school
participation rate was down to 83 percent, from 90 percent five
years earlier. Add to this the dropout rate of 10.57 percent for
elementary-school pupils—and you have roughly a quarter of all
Filipino children growing up functionally illiterate. (Only 59
percent of those who enter Grade One ever finish high school.)
This early, the National Economic
and Development Authority (NEDA) has affirmed there’s no way we
could meet our Millennium Development Goal of universal primary
education by 2015. Yet only education—together with primary health
care, which is just as badly deficient in funding—can alter our
cycle of poverty passed down from generation to generation.
Professionalizing
the bureaucracy
Right now, the educational
disaster isn’t even the worst of our problems. The mother of all
our difficulties is our lack of a professional bureaucracy. It
impedes critically the Philippine state’s capacity—because
governance depends on the efficient allocation and use of public
resources, and the building and strengthening of public
institutions.
Our country is the exception
among East Asian countries in not having a tradition of rule by a
civil service of competent and impartial administrators accustomed
to think of themselves as independent of—and superior to—the
grubbing politicians.
Unlike the British, the Dutch,
the French—and even the Japanese in Korea and Taiwan—the
Americans, like the Spaniards before them, never built up a
professional civil service in their Philippine colony.
Madrid acquired our archipelago
after its imperial power had peaked, while Washington decided early
on to give up its military-exposed West Pacific outpost. To compound
this lack, America left us instead a tradition of rule by elected
politicians.
Early on our civil service became
a prize of the political spoils system. Until now, an incoming
president gets to appoint 8,400 bureaucrats and heads of public
corporations, down to assistant-director level—effectively
decapitating the civil service every time an administration changes.
Perennially confronted with the importunings of elite interests, our
senior bureaucracy has historically been too weak to carry out
coherent public policies.
Raising bureaucratic
competence
The Philippine state’s
inability to govern is patent not only in the extent of corruption
in office but in the expansion of the “underground” economy,
which surpassed the formal economy two decades ago. In most poor
countries, this informal sector declines as the economy grows.
Meanwhile, the civil service has also become the employer of last
resort. Currently it employs 11 percent of our entire work force.
Everybody agrees we need
efficiency, openness and accountability in government. But
inculcating these bureaucratic virtues is so formidable a job that
no administration has even attempted it. (Former President Fidel
Ramos was reportedly privately relieved when Congress turned down
his bid for “emergency powers” to initiate the effort.) But the
task must be tried, and government might look—profitably—to
Latin-American models of bureaucratic reform, as it has to the
continent’s methods of easing its own school-dropout problem.
The ‘pockets of
efficiency’ model
Latin American
statesmen—realizing as our senior politicians do the enormity of
the problem of transforming the civil service from nepotism to
meritocracy—have focused on reinforcing bureaucracies in the key
departments—those that undertake the most critical jobs and handle
the largest amounts of public money. The crucial problem is how to
insulate the bureaucracy from unremitting pressures from powerful
people—in and out of government—to use public resources and
official powers for private goals.
Beginning in the 1950s, Brazil
had invented what it calls “pockets of efficiency” and grupos
executivos. These groups are organizationally separate from the
central bureaucracy and insulated from Congressional interference.
Autonomous in both budget and
recruitment methods, untenured but better paid, the pockets of
efficiency and the executive groups built up first-class staffs with
a strong sense of mission. And they became responsible for
Brazil’s most impressive economic achievements during its
transition to great-power status in the 1960s.
The key component to the success
of the “pockets of efficiency” model is the unequivocal and
active support of reformist presidents—which Getulio Vargas and
Juscelino Kubitschek were in the Brazil of that period.
If fortune should favor us with a
reformist chief executive in 2010, we should consider installing our
own variation of the Brazilian pockets-of-efficiency model in our
most notorious Cabinet agencies. Of course, reforms that depend on
the backing of individual leaders, instead of on stable public
institutions, are liable to be fragile. Given dogged resistance from
both Congress and the old-line bureaucracy, neither Vargas nor
Kubitschek’s innovations survived their time in office. But it
seems to me it is far better for us to try what the Brazilians did
than passively to continue bearing the burden of our demoralized,
downtrodden civil service.
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