The next 100 days: Fighting the ‘tyranny of the urgent’

An improbable presidential candidate only a year before, Benigno Simeon Aquino 3rd, has ascended the pinnacle of power as the country’s 15th head of state. In inauguration ceremonies marked by exuberant celebration of a people-powered campaign and pregnant with high hopes for the future, “P-Noy,” the new president’s preferred appellation, signaled a dramatic departure from the preceding administration’s excesses.

“You are the boss,” he emphatically declared to a citizenry that gave him a landslide win in the May 10, 2010 elections. No more special privileges for the powerful, full accountability of public officials, the determination to curb corruption, repair damaged institutions and restore social trust. “We will learn to dream again” (“Maari na tayong mangarap muli”), the new president intoned as power was formally transferred by noon of June 30.

The elections of 2010, after all, began with a hastily assembled campaign fueled largely by volunteer effort and the overriding public disdain for a scandal-plagued and legitimacy-challenged Arroyo regime. As the Noynoy phenomenon took the country by storm, following former President Cory Aquino’s death in August 2009, small towns and big cities yet again emptied themselves out to rally around a battlecry of change and the symbols and idioms of hope: the yellow ribbons that emerged everywhere, the “L” sign flashed as a defiant call to soldier on, the return to the meaning of Ninoy’s and Cory’s sacrifice.

Campaign as poetry

The 2010 national campaign was largely about “people power” expressed via the ballot—a movement for change masquerading as an electoral exercise, as one pundit put it. People simply, perhaps even desperately, just wanted to believe in government and their leaders again. In an earlier “piso-piso para sa pagbabago” initiative, scavengers in Payatas, the metropolis’ biggest dump, sank into sundry donation cans what were hard-earned peso coins with the plea: “sana magpakatino lang ang mga nasa posisyon upang makaahon din kami.” Such are simple hopes of the poor and all the other sectors who want the running of government to be fair and for leaders to be honest.

In such aspirational terms, it was easy to campaign with the poetry of hope, and the ennobling language of change: landas ng pagbabago, tahakin ang daang matuwid, laban na tapat-laban ng lahat, kung walang kurap walang mahirap.

Now that President Aquino is chief executive of the Republic, he knows that these words of exhortation and encouragement meant to win hearts and minds will have to be matched with appreciable initiatives and clearly laid out programs on a range of critical fronts: education, health, jobs, justice, food, anti-corruption, the environment, Mindanao. The “poetry of the campaign” will give way to the sometimes crude, raw “prose of governing.”

‘Tyranny of the urgent’

Governing, all told, will entail making tough decisions, striking a balance between short-term pressing needs with longer-term imperatives for reform. Almost everything will demand government’s immediate attention and every sector or constituency will have an advocacy or agenda to push.

After almost a decade of political turbulence, fixing government will mean fighting what historian Barbara Tuchman calls the “tyranny of the urgent.” The capacity to govern, she argues, “is sapped by interlocking crises.” Weighed down by present demands, government can hardly plan for the longer future. Job creation to reduce poverty and spurring economic activity in the rural areas, for instance, will have to move along with restricting impacts on fragile or threatened ecosystems.

Hundred-aay mark

It becomes, therefore, just as important to manage rising public expectations that came with the election of President Aquino. The people, especially the vast numbers of the poor, know there are no quick-fixes in solving problems. As a key reform thrust, eradicating corruption, for example, that has become endemic in bureaucratic processes or in the overall dealing with government, will not happen overnight.

We can work to make incremental advances, and not necessarily seek total victories. The Aquino administration can set doable, practicable targets in the first three to six months—or the traditional hundred days—that will have high impact and serve notice that it is serious about its avowed push to make government functional as the people’s servant.

For a start, government can work towards simplifying doing business with government and make the bureaucracy more “citizen-friendly.” What may take several steps and labyrinthine, red-taped procedures to obtain various permits or begin projects could be cut into half—from, say, 40 signatures to 20, in a defined, shortened period—without comprising effective regulation or oversight. This is what Colombia did a few years ago, when a new president was elected with a mandate to break the inertia of inaction or ineptitude in government’s service delivery functions.

Government can show commitment to public health and environmental protection, as another example, by making the major thoroughfares like EDSA smoke belching-free. Or engaging schools, youth and local governments to reforest with several thousand trees in the first three months at least five of the most critical watersheds in the country.

Government can establish a more structured round-the-clock feedback mechanism (a “political, e-democracy call center,” as it were) using all the tools of new media for citizens to be engaged, to hold officials accountable, or to seek redress or assistance.

There are numerous ways to make the renewed social contract, made formal with the election of Mr.
Aquino, work in the context of the “tyranny of the urgent” —addressing pervasive social ills and dealing with the fierce political contestation of interests. We just have to sustain what was started in the campaign, where Filipinos from all stations in life came out of their comfort zones and stood up to be heard and counted.

And that we can all do—for a hundred days, or every day for all of our lives as citizens of a country we love. Democracy, after all, is never a finished project. –NERIC ACOSTA, Manila Times

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Neric Acosta, environmental advocate and professor of public policy, was congressman of Bukidnon from 1998 to 2007 and Liberal Party senatorial candidate in the Aquino-Roxas ticket.