IN his best-selling book, The Blame Game (published in 2011 by Simon & Schuster), world-renowned psychologist Ben Dattner said, “too often, people and organizations get caught up in ‘the blame game’ and the wrong people get blamed for the wrong reasons at the wrong time.”
“The result can be that people are demotivated and demoralized, focus more on organizational politics than on getting the job done, and are too afraid to speak up or experiment with new approaches,” the organizational Harvard author said.
“Those in the current administration continued to pave their daang matuwid with a bulldozer of blame, running over every one who crosses its path,” said Dr. Ernie Gonzales, a fellow environmental economist of the London School of Economics and previous chairman of the Economics National Research Council of the Philippines.
Gonzales said: Although it was not explicitly stated, everyone believes now that President Aquino is referring to the University of Santo Tomas (UST) when he passed the buck as to who is to blame for the flooding of Metro Manila.
“This is a gross show of the management style of the President, which is unwanted and unbecoming for a leader blaming anyone except himself who makes the decision in the first instance but avoids taking responsibility for the unwarranted consequences of his decision,” Gonzales added.
According to him, spokesman Edwin Lacierda, a member of the “President’s cordon sanitaire,” must be lying in his talk on Tuesday to Lynda Jumilla of ANC’s Beyond Politics when he defended the plan of the government to use UST’s open grounds as a catchment basin for Metro Manila flooding.
“Why is Attorney Lacierda surprisingly not aware that the current plan now is no longer a UST catchment basin but merely a flood interceptor system so that floodwaters can be diverted directly toward the pumping stations of Metro Manila with the new designs to make all the drainage systems of Metro Manila work?” Gonzales asked.
Gonzales also asked: “If he is not aware of this, together with the President, why is it possible that one of his best Cabinet Secretary Babes Singson had not told them about this flood interceptor, which is highly doubtful?”
“Otherwise, if this is correct, then the two are not lying, but simply ignorant of what is happening around them. And, this is even far worse than lying and gross inefficiency over the millions worth of decisions entrusted to them by the ‘impoverished 100 Million Free People of God,’” he said.
Gonzales said the scientific implication herewith is that the 21.5 hectare equivalent of the underground catchment of UST is simply not enough to contain, for instance, the expected volume of climate-change flood like Typhoon Ondoy [international code name Ketsana].
“If another Ondoy strikes Manila, which is likely in the near future, this underground flood containment in UST could even inundate the whole UST, a precious 400-year-old national treasure,” Gonzales warned.
“Moreover,” he said, “the estimated losses of P2 billion due to floods cannot refer to this limited fraction of UST flooding effect. Therefore, this decision to create a flood basin directly under the ground of UST is tantamount to “institutional suicide.”
“The President’s much vaunted daang matuwid must build and not destroy, especially the most precious depository of priceless cultural artifacts and not to mention the whole of UST as a pontifical and royal
institution,” Gonzales stressed.
“It is also ironic that, while the public clamor for the removal of a visual obstruction to the historic Rizal monument, our President is blaming a historical institution for causing inconvenience to the public,” he said.
Gonzales said the truth magnified the lies beneath it. “What is truthful herewith is how the President’s P354-billion Flood Control Program is spent, and why a simple Flood Control Study of this Department of Public Works and Highways Portfolio already amounted to more than P200 million?”
“For instance,” he said, “a simple study like the VOM [Valenzuela-Obando-Meycauayan] Area had already incurred a total cost of P60 million just to validate the economic feasibility of this project.”
In concluding his statement to this writer, Gonzales said: “The public must closely take a look at these huge expenditures in flood control studies undertaken, in particular, and the whole project, in general. This is where the “truth” of daang matuwid in flood control can be more than relevant than simply passing the buck to UST.”
