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PAMPANGA
Gov. Ed Panlilio on Wednesday called on the members of
the Financial Executives Institute of the
Philippines
(Finex) not to lose hope for the needed change in the
present system of government.
“I now
invite you, as financial experts, to look into
yourselves and find out how you can help in this
transformation. You have expertise, the capacity to
retool government into efficient, energized and
effective body, without turning it into faceless
corporate entity. Let us begin by being good citizens,
responsive and responsible, even when no one is
looking,” he said.
Contrary
to conventional wisdom, the Filipinos have not become
inured to the issues at hand; they are just waiting for
people who can earn their trust, who can speak and act
with integrity, he said. “All too often, we place our
notion of good and evil in compartments.”
“We are
a people of hope, a people of resurrection. Capampangans
have proven that if we all just work together to push
for the attainment of a goal, no political giant, no
gargantuan war can stop us. If it happened in Pampanga,
why can’t it happen anywhere else?
He said
he was not talking about electing a priest to public
office. “To be clear about it, I am referring to a
collective movement of people to advocate reforms.”
A priest
who is suspended from his priestly duties while he is in
office, Panlilio said that upon assumption to office he
directed the suppliers and bidders to the provincial
government’s projects to follow the “high moral road. No
more payola, no more ‘standard operating procedure
[SOP]’, no more cutting of corners in projects.”
“That
SOP, it speaks a lot of our cultural mindset and moral
framework when we refer to graft as standard operating
procedure. Since this is the case, then we might as well
legislate the amount of greed that is moderate enough to
be acceptable,” he said.
He said,
“Graft is a cultural aberration” and is “a grievous sin
that puts a heavy burden on future generations. It is a
sin against the innocent. No, we should not moderate the
greed. We should eliminate the greed.”
Panlilio
said it is an unnecessary addition to overhead costs
which contractors recover by producing substandard work.
“From a
financial point of view, this is bad economics, in the
sense that so much money circulates, but is not invested
to create more money. It goes to the pockets of a few,
while pushing the citizenry into greater indebtedness,”
Panlilio said.
“While
trimming the bureaucratic fat was one of the ways we
control the financial outflow, we also had to do
something about the financial income.
“We were
able to increase the revenue collections from all
sectors in just six months, including the
often-mentioned quarry taxes, which equaled years of
collection within a short span of time. I guess this
would not have happened had the people not invested
their trust in our administration.
Panlilio
said, “Trust is a virtue that we seem to lack when we
look at the government.”
“Conversely, our government rarely trusts us. It keeps
on pushing for a national ID system, for one because we
are not trusted with our responsibilities.” He said the
government itself operates on a premise of distrust.
He said
he was disturbed when Senate witness Rodolfo “Jun”
Lozada remarked that the government has a dysfunctional
procurement system.
“Dysfunctional is a word of recent coinage, signifying
the difficulty or the inability to perform a task or
reach a purpose. That it is mainly used to describe
psychosocial aberrant cases is quite remarkable, since
trust is psychological as well,” Panlilio said.
He said
many Filipinos would rather cheat on their taxes,
because they could not see their money going to proper
services.
At the
same time, the government would cheat on infrastructure
projects. “This vicious circle of mistrust should stop.
We should start all over again,” he said.
“We live
in times of great potential; in times of pregnant
excitement. We are on a page of developing history when
the call for greatness has never been as strident,”
Panlilio said. |
