LGUs are more effective

"The national government should learn to use them more instead of its fossilized bureaucrats."

In the war against Covid-19, whether at the tracing and testing stage, to the need for better healthcare facilities, and now the slow roll-out of the vaccines that are in short supply, the national government should learn to use the local government officials more instead of its fossilized bureaucrats.

 I recall an incident a month ago when senators, aghast at the confusion in our pandemic war, proposed the abolition of the Inter-Agency Task Force that presides over the fight against COVID-19. It was the young mayor of Manila, Isko Moreno Domagoso, who took the cudgels for the task force, saying that this was not the time to ascribe fault or re-invent the tools of war, but to have a unified stand on how to correct what was wrong.

I now wonder if Yorme was just being nice, a case of noblesse oblige even.

Someone in the staff of one of the 28 regular members who compose the IATF who worked with me at one time in the recent past told me that they have interminably long meetings, sometimes lasting for more than nine hours straight, with resource persons from the medical and scientific community allowed to speak lengthily, sometimes emotionally, with the meetings failing to come up with a definitive program of action.

I wondered: Aren’t these resource persons supposed to be in a technical working group meeting, the output of which would be policy recommendations from which the top honchos of the IATF could base their informed decisions?

Also, why such a huge number of members in the task force, each one, typical of most Filipino bureaucrats, insisting on their ten minutes of fame speaking over the microphone, sometimes spewing nonsense, just to be heard?

I don’t want to make comparisons with Taiwan, where the results of the war against COVID-19 are now hailed world-wide as a template on how to tame the pandemic. But despite the huge difference in their healthcare system and ours, there is one sticking lesson that I observed.  And that is a single unified system under the Minister of Health as head of the Central Epidemic Command Center. 

Of course, comparing Minister Chen Shih-chung with our Secretary Francisco Duque is like comparing gold to un-plated “tanso.”  

From the start of the epidemic, and before the WHO decided to call it a pandemic, Minister Chen got the transportation ministry, the economic affairs ministry, the national immigration agency, and other relevant offices to first: Close the borders on all flights coming from Hubei, and a week later, all of China.  Then he asked the MOEA to call together all the capable manufacturers to ramp up their production of face masks, because he would order every citizen and resident to wear face masks in public.  

Minister Chen conducted daily press conferences, without a spokesman for the CECC, but himself, until the situation normalized.  He was a cool, not shrill, purveyor of the latest news and government directives.  There was no lockdown, only a selective closure of crowded venues.  Schools closed only for two weeks in February, then resumed with social distancing (which of course was not a problem for Taiwan which has so many public schools, and because of low population growth, have few enrollees compared to our jampacked classrooms).

But all that is in the past.  Everyone with enough brains in the Philippines knows how difficult it is to cure an original wrong move insofar as a pandemic is concerned.  We failed to do the right things from the start, now we suffer the consequences of inaction and delayed action.

Moving forward, now that we are trying to inoculate millions with the vaccines available, whether donated or purchased by the government or the private sector, I noticed that, at least in the national capital region, it is young and dynamic mayors who are the more effective implementers of the vaccination drive.  If only their effectiveness were not hobbled by a laggard national government bureaucracy and a debating society called the IATF.

Sec. Charlie Galvez is a very cool person, but maybe he should stop abiding with the interminable talk of his members and inviting resource persons who love to talk without understanding either the simple math of supply versus demand for vaccines, or are more heart than science. 

Here is an unsolicited advice to the gentleman czar:  Use the local governments more than the national government bureaucrats and the headless chickens who lead them.

Young or youngish mayors like Vico Sotto, Isko Moreno, Abigail Binay, Marcy Teodoro, Rex Gatchalian, Lino Cayetano, Toby Tiangco, and others are showing that they know what it takes to get things done efficiently and effectively.  They also know how to use their local resources optimally and complementary to the national government; and more than anything else, they know their communities, the people and their respective environments. They can localize actions and reactions.  They can solve problems when they appear, on the spot.

Now compare that with the DOH bureaucracy, and even other departments involved in the IATF, and weep.  Thank God Secretary Galvez has a Vince Dizon as his co-worker, who is both intelligent and a busybody.  Even the dynamic Baguio City Mayor Benjie Magalong seems to have given up working with the jurassics.

And to think that we started off the present administration espousing federalism, which in essence means devolving power and responsibility to the local government units.  Like the former mayor of Davao, now president of the land, local government officials are more intimately knowledgeable of their constituents, and are subject to accountability every three years.  So unless they are idiots or simply buy votes to get themselves re-elected, they know they have to perform and perform well so they pass the test of public service.

Appointed officials and their sluggish bureaucrats just play to the political music, or get atrophied by protection of civil service permanence.

 This war against the pandemic will last beyond the 2022 elections, and the public will realize, if they have not yet realized, who are the dedicated, the effective, the efficient, versus the fence-sitters, the worn-out, and the incompetents.