ONE of the most infuriating aspects of the Aquino administration was its inability to provide timely services to the transacting public. These were services that we had previously taken for granted, until President Benigno Aquino III and his cronies put their own inimitable stamp of incompetence and corruption on the government bureaucracy.
The poster child of this incompetence and corruption was the Land Transportation Office, an agency under what used to be called the Department of Transportation and Communication. The department has since been reorganized as the Department of Transportation, but the mess left by the Aquino administration in the LTO remains.
Trouble began almost immediately with the appointment of Mr. Aquino’s shooting buddy, Virginia Torres, to the top post in 2010. As LTO chief, Torres quickly became embroiled in an ugly ownership dispute over the agency’s private technology provider, Stradcom Corp., which disrupted the issuance of drivers’ licenses. Suddenly, the renewal of drivers’ licenses—a process that used to take a little over an hour—involved a months-long waiting period. After a scandal in which Torres was seen on a video playing the slots at a casino, the LTO chief was allowed to retire in 2013, leaving the driver’s license mess to her successor, Alfonso Tan Jr. Taking a leaf from his predecessor, Tan approved an anomalous P3.8-billion deal with a Dutch-Filipino consortium to replace all existing car plates with imported ones. When the Commission on Audit disallowed the deal in 2015, millions of car owners who had already paid for their replacement license plates were told they wouldn’t get them any time soon. Nor, they were told, would they be given refunds for the license plates they never received. By the time Tan was replaced by Roberto Cabrera in January this year, the new LTO chief estimated that the agency’s backlog of license plates had reached almost four million.
In his inaugural address, President Rodrigo Duterte declared that the country’s biggest problem was not crime or corruption, but the people’s loss of confidence in their own government.
At the same time, he ordered his Cabinet secretaries and heads of agencies to immediately cut red tape in their respective departments and to make no changes to government contracts that have already been approved.
Duterte said these policies needed to be set straight immediately.
The President’s assessment and his order seem particularly relevant to the LTO, which has made life more difficult for motorists and car owners alike in the last six years. Any moves to restore public confidence in the government clearly ought to begin here.
