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FINE
timing, indeed. On the day we editorialized in this
space the perils of swallowing hook, line and sinker all
results of those myriad lists and indices put out by a
plethora of expert groups—we called some of them “policy
entrepreneurs”—came yet another survey, this time on
e-governance, ranking the Philippines a high 17th in a
field of 191.
According to the Department of Foreign Affairs, which
released the report, the United Nations E-Governance
Survey gave the country a high rank because of “the
innovative ways the government is employing to improve
public administration.” Fair enough.
As
examples of what merited the Philippines such a good
ranking, the DFA said the raters were impressed by the
government’s tie-up, using e-government tools, with the
private sector in monitoring polluters. The web-measure
index was said to have assessed the quality of
government web sites and the level of utilization of
information and communication technology (ICT) tools in
government.
Relatedly, in a general survey of e-government
readiness, the Philippines ranked a relatively high 41st
among 179 countries, meaning, the national government is
ready and willing to use e-government for ICT-led
development.
The
initiatives on which our relatively high ranking is
based certainly are meritorious on their face. But as we
warned in our earlier editorial, there are pitfalls in
such rankings simply because they may pertain—in this
case—to initiatives with which the great mass of people
do not identify.
The
effort to use ICT for improving efficiency, transparency
and participativeness in state transactions gathered a
good deal of momentum about eight, 10 years ago.
Those
were the years when, for instance, the National Treasury
(under Leonor Briones) modernized T-bill auctions, doing
away with manual procedures; the defense establishment,
with Congress’s help, pushed for e-procurement, thus
drastically limiting the opportunities for doctoring the
canvass procedures and formal bidding among state
agencies needing certain supplies or services—from the
big-ticket combat materials to ordinary supplies.
Even
local governments had their own success stories, some of
them with the help of UN agencies and local NGOs, such
as the anticorruption initiative in Abra.
Then
followed the efforts to use ICT for centralizing and
streamlining the work of statistical agencies, which was
very basic and crucial, and to speed up and render more
efficient and transparent
the services of such major frontline entities as the BIR,
the SSS and the GSIS.
Indeed,
the past 10 to 15 years are filled with success stories
of ICT use for improving governance. With one glaring,
and damaging, gap: the country’s failure to modernize
its electoral system, so that now, 15 years after the
Commission on Elections under Christian Monsod received
UN support for the automation initiative, we are still
in square one. This, despite billions of taxpayers’
money expended for failed initiatives, such as the
voters’ registration and the vote-counting machines.
Thus, we
are all caught in the utterly shameful scenario of
leaving the last slot in the Senate elections hanging,
because everyone depended on hard copies of election
documents that were conveniently “stolen,” only to be
replaced with second copies that will never be credible
because they had been posted in public places and thus,
easily trifled with.
Sorry to
rain on the e-governance advocates’ parade, but this is
the fact: for as long as the election system uses
stone-age tools and the Neanderthals exploit this
backwardness to hijack the people’s mandate, we can’t
really be celebrating. |
