THE main character in a popular comic strip that pokes fun at the corporate world one day discovers that in his company, the pay’s the same whether you try or not.
This epiphany is similar to what we have come to realize about the administration of President Benigno Aquino III. When failure to achieve goals consistently goes unpunished, you create a culture of indifference and incompetence that permeates the entire bureaucracy.
We have already documented many times before how the President’s refusal to remove his inept Transportation secretary has led to suffering for millions of hapless commuters, motorists and travelers.
The same can be said of the President’s Agriculture secretary, who has gone unpunished despite various graft and corruption cases filed against him, and his inability to make good on his boast that the country—under the leadership of this administration—can achieve self-sufficiency in rice.
This secretary, however, has proved far more effective at making excuses and clinging to his job.
The lackadaisical attitude towards real work might also explain why there have been no major infrastructure projects completed during Mr. Aquino’s six years in office—despite hefty budget allocations set aside for this purpose.
In law enforcement, this failure to punish the incompetent has had disastrous results. Would the 44 Special Action Force police commandos have died in the covert Mamasapano operation on Jan. 25, 2015 had the President not relied on his friend, the suspended national police chief, to oversee the mission?
This culture of incompetence has seeped into constitutional bodies as well. After compelling millions of registered voters to submit biometric data for their IDs, the Commission on Elections said most of those IDs would not be issued until after the May 2016 elections are over. Frontline personnel at the Comelec, in fact, offer no apologies to people who lined up hours for the IDs, and instead told them nonchalantly that they should expect to receive them years from today.
This week, the Comelec announced too that it would be late in printing the official ballots for this year’s elections, missing its self-imposed deadline for doing so. Worse, one commissioner admitted, problems with the automated vote counting system could actually postpone elections in some provinces. The suggestion is unacceptable, striking as it does at the heart of our democratic system.
The chairman of the Senate committee on electoral reforms expressed disappointment in the Comelec’s lack of foresight and preparedness.
Still, these poll officials continue to draw their pay, along with congressmen who cannot be bothered to attend sessions, Cabinet secretaries who do more harm than good, and a President who delights in the company of fawning incompetents. All this is inevitable when the pay’s the same whether you try or not.