Ping de Jesus, former secretary of the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC), bowed out of the government agency with his dignity intact, his work regimen beyond compare and his tuwid na landas concept encapsulated in changes he administered in a punishing pace that saw him preside over Saturday executive sessions with department officials.

In the end, he saw how frustrating it was to battle the demons of inefficiency and bureaucracy that plague government agencies and instead of being gobbled up by the system, opted instead for moving on. The resignation of Ping comes at a time when the majority in the government remained tacked to their old ways with nary an accomplishment to breast-beat about, save for a surplus in finances that is actually not something positive since it means that the government curtailed expenditures just to post that surplus.

This fiscal compression can be likened to a son telling his parents that the family has spare money stashed in the bank, when the truth of the matter is that the payments to the bank were delayed, the repair on the leaking roof was moved a month away, and the supposed tuition for the siblings were paid in installments.

Ping usually arrives at his office at 8 a.m. and knocks off at 8 p.m., even when he was nursing an excruciating back pain. He also made it a habit to call Saturday meetings to finish pending issues on various projects—for the agency oversaw various government units that, in turn, regulated the country’s air, sea and land.

We saw Ping looking haggard after that unfortunate incident at the Land Transportation Office (LTO), when the service there was interrupted for eight hours because of a raid on its information-technology facility. I was then in the DOTC headquarters to attend the birthday celebration of a DOTC official whom I know personally. Later on I learned that in the ensuing konfrontasi between the warring stockholders, Ping asked for a corporate document to back up the claims of the raiding party and was shown none.

It is this issue of the LTO controversy that contributed to the decision of Ping to vacate his post, aside from at least three big-ticket items where he found to his dismay the bureaucratic entanglements he had to deal with just to move the paper trail from point A to point B.

What Ping sought to do at the DOTC was to ensure that certain approved projects be renegotiated with lower costs for the government where necessary; he was aided by eagle-eyed auditors who looked at the project costs, matched them with comparative ones, and then renegotiated with the winning bidders. He was successful in this, but had to grapple with the bureaucratic maze in which government units operate. In the Metro Rail Transit (MRT) 7 project, for instance, Ping and his like-minded reform officials were able to cut the cost of the highway component of the project to below the median cost of a comparable highway that of the Department of Public Works and Highways. The average cost per kilometer amounted only to P80 million per kilometer.

And so the paper trail for the said MRT 7 project went from one government agency to the next, and while the paper was being shuttled from one agency to another, it did not gather momentum. Ping found out to his utter dismay that he had to contend with the MRT 7 project papers being shunted from the Department of Finance to the National Economic and Development Authority, and to the Office of the President and to whatever agency it had to be submitted to.

Again, Ping had to deal with the issue of the Naia 3, that airport that has come to showcase the Philippines as a model of backward development. Almost finished and yet not harnessed to good use, the airport terminal became a focal point of the ex-DOTC head’s mission impossible: have it repaired at a lower cost.

The issue boiled down to whether to contract Takenaka as general contractor once again, given the lopsided job that was done in the airport terminal. Here, Ping benchmarked the costs of the repair, especially on those structures that were to be built on a par with international standards. For Ping, while Takenaka was guilty of a bad job, the contractor provided the optimum cost to putting the terminal in tip-top shape.

Ping’s reasoning was simple: It was better to deal with Takenaka than having the repair job bidded out as it would result in higher costs to the government. Aside, of course, from the unreasonable delays. Again the decision on the repair job was shunted from one point to the next, leading Ping to start contemplating his fate in exasperation over the meaninglessness of what he and his group have been trying to implement at the agency.

There were more. Ping had to surmount ever higher hurdles even if he saw to it that bidding—transparent and fair—be the norm for DOTC projects. He abhorred unsolicited proposals and ordered his men to look at approved memorandums of agreement and memorandums of understanding concerning almost every conceivable project with one mantra: Bring the costs down.

But Ping finally felt his efforts were useless in a bureaucracy where inefficiency and corruption were de rigueur. And before he could be consumed by the system, he opted to move on.

Bayantel interconnection

Interconnection among the telecom companies seemed a galaxy away with the continued refusal of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT), the dominant telco, to allow other telcos to be interconnected with their system. In the Camanava area, for instance, many subscribers of Bayantel are unable to connect to PLDT phones within the area as can be evidenced by the lack of the connecting click usually present when the lines are interconnected.

It takes at least up to four attempts before a Bayantel subscriber can link up with a PLDT user, and yet this was supposed to have been a thing of the past with the approval of the telecom law that allowed the country to move into the 21st century.

E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it