FIRST, it was the National Economic and Development Authority reporting that 23 socioeconomic projects supported with official development assistance have been delayed in the pipeline because of funding and procurement problems.
Then comes Sen. Ralph Recto telling us that thousands of classrooms that the new K to 12 educational program will require have not been constructed, despite the fact that funds have been appropriated for the purpose. Now, it is Communications Secretary Herminio B. Coloma Jr., on learning that a United Nations official has lamented the inadequacy of the government’s assistance to the victims of Supertyphoon Yolanda of November 2013, promising that funds for the resettlement of the stricken people will be appropriated soon.
What’s wrong with the government’s spending priorities? Why is the government apparently unable to systematize its spending procedures? Why can it not spend budgetary appropriations in the time and place that they are needed?
The answer is not as simple as it seems. First of all, systematic procedures require that the budget of the department concerned must be sufficiently detailed as to provide unambiguous guidance for decision-making by officials concerned; not the lump-sum appropriations that characterize the usual departmental budgets. Detailed budgets require effort and time to prepare, commodities that the uninspired government bureaucrat is loathe devoting time to such duties. Moreover, detailed itemization of budgetary allocations leaves little room for the exercise of “discretion,” making itemization unattractive to officials who have little designs of their own.
The systematization of government spending procedures, thus, requires technical competence and moral integrity on the part of the participants in the spending process. Do not members of our civil service have these qualities? Of course, they do. A possible explanation for the shortcoming is that civil servants, after attaining security of tenure, no longer feel wedded to the lofty standards of service they entered into when they enlisted in the government and have now passively succumbed to the life of the dispirited and the mediocre. A more credible explanation is that the cronies who have been appointed to positions of leadership in the government are not technically and morally qualified for those positions.
As everybody should now know, this woeful spending habit of the government is costing us much. It is reducing the growth rate of our economy and, in the process, diminishing the economy’s capacity to create jobs for the working people, constricting our ability to reduce the income inequality that distinguishes our society. It is preventing the implementation of socially oriented programs that will cure widespread poverty in our midst and enhance the living standards of the Filipino people. Obviously, we cannot allow this state of affairs to persist. One of the steps to be taken involves the technical revitalization of concerned members in the civil service. Another is the dismissal of incompetent department secretaries and their coteries, and having them replaced with technically and morally qualified people.
Must we wait for the next administration to carry out these vitally necessary measures to attune our government to the demands of development?
Image credits: Jimbo Albano
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Dapat ganito ang picture. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/988bf6c90abb661919da91a25557b0e516098ac921efb39a51002c9c52eaae3b.jpg