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ONE of
the hard-hit casualties in the ongoing national
broadband network (NBN)-ZTE controversy must even now
start to pick up the pieces of its tattered reputation,
if we are serious about the future of the Philippine
bureaucracy.
Before
President Arroyo named the then-House planning and
budget office chief to be the director general of the
National Economic and Development Authority (Neda), the
socioeconomic-planning body had been suffering a slow
decline in influence and esteem in the Cabinet.
The last
nail was made by Mrs. Arroyo when she named Romulo Neri
to the Neda, despite initial warnings by
well-intentioned experts that he was too “politicized,”
having served for some eight years with Speaker Jose de
Venecia Jr. and being saddled with the reputation of
being fast and loose with data and information, not to
mention too steeped in the ways of a very political body
like Congress.
It
wouldn’t take long for him to start living up to that
reputation, starting with his famous briefing that the
country has more than a trillion dollars worth of
mineral reserves and this, if exploited, would send the
gross domestic product soaring to stratospheric heights.
As far as we remember, he never validated this claim.
But as
it turned out, an inclination to hyperbole wasn’t to be
the worst problem with then-director general Neri. When
the initial details of how the government vetted the NBN
first came out, it became immediately apparent that the
Neda under his watch had been relegated to the margins
of the Cabinet.
Of
course, it may seem too much to expect the new Neda
chief to have the character of the then-chain-smoking
Solita Collas-Monsod, the first Neda chief after Marcos
who took it upon herself, with help from very able
deputies, to give the planning body the position it
deserved as primus inter pares in the Cabinet. After
Monsod, the Neda was observed to be slowly declining in
influence, but some observers just attributed this to
the fact that her successors were not as colorful or
emphatic as she was.
But at
least their credentials as economists were beyond
reproach. These names quickly come to mind— Jesus
Estanislao, Cayetano Paderanga, Dante Canlas, Cielito
Habito and Felipe Medalla.
The
current DG, Augusto “Tito”
Santos,
is a very competent career man at the Neda, but
unfortunately has been made to suffer the injustice of
warming Neri’s seat as “acting DG” in between Neri’s
stints at the Neda.
Mr.
Santos should stay on as Neda chief for good, and the
Palace must banish all illusion by Neri that, per a
supposed presidential promise, he will be back at the
Neda after six months, when he finishes
“trouble-shooting” at the Commission on Higher
Education. Considering Neri’s very politicized
background, it is fair to surmise that a “return” to the
Neda was dangled precisely to influence his behavior in
the NBN inquiry.
That
troubling issue aside, the fact is that the processes
undergone by the NBN in themselves already reflect the
narrow field to which the Neda under Neri limited
itself. As gleaned from the paper by UP School of
Economics dean Noel de Dios and Prof. Raul Fabella, the
Neda’s inputs were not given much weight later when the
Cabinet decided on the NBN.
And
Medalla, a former economics dean and Neda chief, was
reported to have said in a forum that it bothered him
that Neri said the Neda wasn’t looking at the financing
side of big projects like the NBN. Indeed, that is
troubling because it would have fallen among the
official development assistance (ODA)-funded projects,
and as everyone knows, ODA-funded projects have always
been the Neda’s task to vet.
Before
that, some Neda officials interviewed in earlier stories
also said they left it to the project proponent, the
Department of Transportation and Communications, to
validate the technical aspects of both the NBN and its
sister, the cyber-education program, another
China-funded project.
While a
proponent agency is expected, indeed, to have the
technical expertise to vet projects, that should not in
any way diminish the Neda’s role to look at the
technical aspects of each major project, and this is
precisely why the Neda is set up into “staffs” with core
expertise in various fields (agriculture,
infrastructure, public investments, regional
development, etc.); and also why the Neda Board meets
regularly with the Cabinet on projects elevated by
interagency Neda Board committees.
That Mr.
Neri allowed the institution he headed to increasingly
lose its say in the Cabinet is perhaps best seen when he
virtually admitted he was bamboozled by his superiors
into giving the NBN clearance.
But
perhaps the worst signal of the low level of confidence
he had in the Neda staff is his decision to tap an
outsider, sans any formal contract, to look at the NBN
deal. Why he would ask an outsider like Rodolfo Noel
Lozada Jr., even assuming his brilliance as a telecoms
engineer, to vet a project when his agency has its own
staff may perhaps be seen in a clearer light when one
considers his famous quote—assuming Lozada told the
truth—that he had asked his friend to step in because
Lozada was needed to “moderate the greed” of unnamed
parties.
It is
inconceivable to think of someone like a Monsod, or any
of her predecessors we named, considering the financing
and specs of multibillion-peso projects from such a
cynical viewpoint.
Given
all that has happened and the institutional damage it
suffered, the Neda must quickly move, even as the NBN
inquiry still runs, to reclaim the mandate its erstwhile
chief had yielded to outsiders, or risk losing the
confidence of foreign financiers, be they
multilateral-bilateral donors or private investors or
contractors.
To be
fair, the Neda has played an active role in streamlining
the different modes by which the build-operate-transfer
law and its variants are applied on big-ticket projects.
Now, it must pursue the process to its logical
conclusion. The most immediate step in this direction is
to assure its various publics that it remains on the
saddle and has not been irremediably co-opted by
politicians. |
