The Presidential Communications Operations Office is at it again. This week alone, two new gaffes earned for it the attention—ridicule—of the public anew.
In big, bold letters, a misspelling of the word “administration” distracted anybody keen on reading about the achievements of President Rodrigo Duterte in his second year in office.
This report was supposed to list what Mr. Duterte shied away from saying in last Monday’s State of the Nation Address—doing so would be self-serving, he said. Instead, the gaping error validated the institutional sloppiness for which the PCOO has become notorious.
More recently a social media user who went to the Freedom of Information page maintained by the same agency found entries such as “d ko alam eh (I don’t know)” and “d ko din alam (I don’t know either)” in the directory for the Maritime Industry Authority and the Office for Transportation Security. The user took screen shots and posted these on Twitter.
Later, the official account of the FOI Initiative said the “error” was already removed. Alas, it was not a simple error. An error would be the wrong contact numbers or a misspelled name.
No wonder the PCOO’s own head, Secretary Martin Andanar, said he couldn’t help suspecting he was being targeted by saboteurs.
But Andanar should not just be suspecting—by this time he should be certain that there are saboteurs indeed in his office. Contrary to expectations, however, there is no need for a witch hunt or a thorough investigation.
The saboteurs are all in plain sight—agency’s officials themselves who refuse to take responsibility for their subordinates’ mistakes, and who fail to establish measures so that errors and other embarrassing work are caught and corrected before they are actually made public, and who get caught up in the glamorous aspects of the job—think of the millions in excessive expenses made during the Asean summit—without the commensurate attention to workmanship.
A few more gaffes, and the PCOO would have to change its name—more importantly, the faces behind it—because the current one is equated with the twin vices of incompetence and arrogance.