Spend and shuffle
The irrepressible Miriam Defensor-Santiago wants the Ombudsman unleashed on Metro Manila mayors who prove incapable or unwilling to properly clean their municipal drains. Pagasa said that garbage clogging drainage facilities has been the main culprit in the flooding that’s afflicted the metropolis. By all means, any means to exact accountability from mayors should be welcomed, but we suspect—based on past administration behavior—that city mayors only get taken to task, when it’s politically expedient to do so.The President embarked on measures that, on the whole, seem sensible and timely. First, she transferred responsibility for Metro Manila’s flood control projects from the Department of Public Works and Highways to the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority. She then instructed the budget secretary to raise MMDA’s flood control budget from its present P101 million to P251 million (for 2008). And she went on to remind barangay officials that they are the front line, so to speak, in flood control efforts—which is very true.
We are, of course, aware of the President’s penchant for trying to solve problems by reshuffling the same tired, old deck of officials, while simultaneously throwing money at the problem. For example, while it does make sense to have the MMDA focus on the National Capital Region’s flood control efforts, we recall MMDA Chair Bayani Fernando crowing to media he had accomplished great things in terms of flood control. The drains, he said, last summer, were in tip-top shape. Now either they were, or weren’t.
If they were, it says a lot of the executive mismanagement of the metropolis that the drains got all fouled up in a matter of months. If they weren’t, then either Fernando was lying or wasn’t on top of the situation: either way, this begs the question of why he deserves to have flood control responsibilities handed back to him. It also needs to be asked—if Fernando had indeed achieved great things with the drains—why flood control had been transferred by the President from the MMDA to the DPWH, only to hand it back to the MMDA again (the mischievous answer is, of course, the magic words, “elections” and “patronage spending”).
Increasing the budget also begs another question: Was the flood control budget being allocated in too niggardly a manner? Could that be the reason why the President has decreed a P100-million increase? But then what does that over-parsimonious initial allocation suggest? Or, could something have been discovered over the past few weeks, which suddenly justifies the increase? We’d certainly like to know what our officials learned over the past few weeks that practical experience didn’t teach them over the past few decades.
Either the government has a plan, or it’s simply allocating money first, and then determining how to really spend it, later. Unfortunately neither prospect is comforting: if it had a plan, but wasn’t adequately funding it, then it can’t dodge the blame Santiago’s trying to pass on to the mayors; if it didn’t have a plan, then how on earth can it make sense to allocate money first, and do the planning later? The whole thing would smack too much of a public works scam in the making.
Still: the President was on to something when she ordered responsibility for flood control handed back to the MMDA. She was correct in urging barangay officials to be more active in declogging the drains. Where she can be even instrumental—that is, truly presidential—is by outlining how national and local governments can come together, integrate their efforts in a combined flood control plan, rationalize the creation and maintenance of the drainage infrastructure, wielding over everyone the tremendous persuasive and coercive powers of her office.
As it is, the long-standing problem of the NCR is that it is a collection of extremely jealous barons, the mayors, who are so insistent on their prerogatives, that a population (for whom the political boundaries the mayors so energetically guard, are essentially fictitious) bears the brunt of their collective arrogance. Legislation may be required, to propose a more unified form of government for the sprawling NCR.
