By current count (and still counting?), there were at least four different Edsa anniversary celebrations scheduled this weekend:
The usual gathering of the Yellow crowd, set for today at the Edsa shrine. Expect them to be joined by Duterte critics of every color and stripe, as they try to amass the numbers they didn’t have when they were roundly trounced in last year’s May elections. Truly, losers never learn.
The official one tomorrow in Camp Aguinaldo, so low-key that it’s practically invisible. The President won’t even show up, sending the Executive Secretary instead. It’s a safe guess that he doesn’t think too highly of this annual spectacle.
An assembly of the President’s supporters at a prayer vigil that starts tomorrow evening in Rizal Park. Similar gatherings are also scheduled elsewhere in the country. Will they behave again as well as they did during the campaign when they cleaned up after themselves at every rally? Maybe someone should do a “trash-o-meter” comparison between them and the Yellows.
The fourth one actually may or may not happen, depending on what the Left decides to do this year. They’re doing quite well with both their legs firmly planted on different bancas, thank you: On one hand, they’re trying their best to kill the President’s troops; on the other, they’re hobnobbing with his official family. Talk about having your cake and eating it, too!
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Every year’s Edsa celebration stretches the limits of what’s absurd and irrelevant. With maybe four different events this weekend, is it unity or cacophony that we’re celebrating? With the country being overtaken in the intervening three decades, first by Thailand, then by Vietnam, next maybe even Myanmar or Bangladesh, is there a development record of sorts that we’re proudly holding up before the world?
And at the heart of Edsa—the simple crime of murder that took away Ninoy’s life three years earlier, in 1983—have we come any closer to identifying, let alone punishing, the mastermind responsible–first under his widow’s rule, then under his son’s?
On whatever scale you use, whether cosmic or commonplace, we shouldn’t wonder then why a lot of today’s kids might dismissively reply, if asked about Edsa—“what-evah!” They do not see any lines that can credibly be drawn from that long-ago event to any possibilities of improvement in their future, or in the country’s.
Those lines can only start from what’s happening today, with what needs fixing and what we’re doing to fix it. And those self-congratulatory memories of Edsa simply distract us from dealing with today’s mistakes.
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An important clue to what’s wrong comes from a mundane inside-page news item the other day: “DBM might scrap 200,000 vacant gov’t positions.”
Apparently, those many positions have gone unfilled literally for years, worth almost P20 billion of annual budget funds. And yet the agencies involved have not fallen apart or gone crashing down.
In the usual measured tones of former Senate President Frank Drilon, “What does that tell you? The positions are not needed!”
Neither I nor, I wager, the reader can imagine something like that happening in the private sector, no matter how large the company. Creating so many unnecessary positions is inefficiency of the grossest kind that would be punished with immediate termination. And yet this has gone on unheeded for years, inside the country’s largest employer, paid for by our taxes that we have no choice but to pay, on pain otherwise of imprisonment.
Too much government inexorably becomes a burden. And this is likelier to happen, the farther government is from the people who should be keeping watch on their political leaders and public servants. And that distance, in turn, is exacerbated for our populous and far-flung islands when there is only one geographical center of power—Manila—and only one locus of power—the presidency.
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Imagine if the civilian agency with the biggest budget, DepEd, were farmed out to, say, half a dozen different federal states. The federal government in Manila might retain a small budget for a small office to create and monitor policy. But the actual teaching, the building of classrooms, the buying of textbooks and computers, the administration of loans and scholarships—these would be the responsibility of each state government.
Because employers, especially foreigners, look for quality of workforce as a major investment criterion, each state would have to show it had the best workforce compared to others, if it wanted to bag investments. And producing the best workforce would require the most motivated and qualified teachers, the most classrooms, the latest computers, the most generous financial assistance.
Financial shenanigans, say, in textbook purchases for Visayan schools would be more easily monitored by ordinary citizens out of a state capital like Cebu rather than far-away Manila. And would there be room in this set-up for any of the 200,000 unnecessary positions discovered by DBM? Not likely.
I think the failure of our national government to bring simple justice to Ninoy—let alone unity and progress after Edsa—tells us there’s a limit to what government can do even in the most auspicious circumstances, even with an extra 200,000 positions to fill up.
When that happens, it’s time to chop up government into more manageable pieces and relocate those pieces much closer to the sovereign people.
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