Sizing up the President

AS PRESIDENT Aquino marks the mid-point of his term, his forthcoming State of the Nation Address (SONA) is going to get more attention, and the hype from both sides of the political arena will be even more intense and exaggerated than usual. To try to keep things on a relatively even keel, the Movement for Good Governance (MGG), to which I belong, will be releasing its third annual score card on the Aquino administration before the SONA is delivered. It will be evaluating the government’s performance based on the President’s Social Contract with the Filipino People, as translated into the Philippine Development Plan 2011-2016.

The MGG has no partisan political axes to grind, but just to be doubly sure that maximum objectivity is exercised, the evaluators’ findings will be subjected to peer review before the final draft of the Scorecard is released. Which means of course that the MGG’s rating of the administration’s performance will neither be as high as the grade the administration will want to give itself, nor as low as what the opposition’s grade will be.

The MGG Scorecard is scheduled to be released the weekend before the SONA, and I don’t intend to second-guess it. But certain aspects of the Aquino administration and its performance are pretty obvious, and can be pointed out with a fair degree of confidence that these will be met with general agreement. So let me stick my neck out, with the caveat that I haven’t completed all the homework required for such an assessment.

The first observation one can make is that this administration has shown much more transparency than its predecessors, allowing its performance to be monitored by setting out any number of quantitatively measurable targets which makes it more difficult for it to dissemble about its achievements or failures. Please note, Reader, that I say that it is more difficult for the administration to dissemble or gloss over certain shortcomings. I did NOT say that this administration doesn’t try to do so.

One can only wish, though, that PNoy would go whole hog and make it impossible for any dissembling whatsoever: by passing the Freedom of Information bill once and for all.

A second observation is that the Aquino administration’s performance in general has been improving, rather than deteriorating. The MGG’s 2011 Scorecard , covering the administration’s first year, gave the latter an overall average of 4.69 out of a possible 10 for its performance in areas including the economy, governance, public finance, health, education and the environment. The 2012 Scorecard showed not only an overall improvement over the previous year, with an average score of 5.59, but also an improvement in each of the individual areas. While the 2013 Scorecard is not yet out, I will be very surprised if its overall average score has not improved, given particularly the accomplishments on the economy (the scoring system is as follows: 0 — no accomplishment whatsoever, the President has broken his promise; 2.5 — progress on achieving the target has been very slow; 5 — there is some accomplishment, but lower than expected; 7.5 — the administration is on track ; 10 — the target has been achieved).

Now for the bad news. A third observation is that the areas where progress is nil or there is even backsliding and controversy are generally the areas where partisan politics rears up its ugly head. And this occurs most often in the matter of appointments. Examples abound: Comelec and the DoJ. What happened in Comelec is more obvious, because of the media coverage — one appointee openly admitting that he had to talk to party bigwigs to clear the way for his appointment, another appointee being sacrificed at the altar of quid-pro-quo politics, the embarrassing necessity of having to withdraw the appointment of a clearly unqualified candidate who got the position because of the power of his political backer.

But the DoJ situation, which is not so well-known, is just as bad. Cases brought by the BIR and the BoC against tax evaders and smugglers to the DoJ for prosecution are languishing there — for lack of prosecutors. One of the reasons why the Maguindanao massacre case is moving so slowly is also because of the same lack. The prosecutors in the DoJ are overworked (they are no longer underpaid, thanks to the RA 10071, the Prosecution Service Act of 2010).

And why are they overworked? Well, because there are 574 unfilled plantilla items for prosecutors as of a couple of months ago (in 2011, there were 517 unfilled positions). And that does not include the 1,000 new prosecutorial positions created by RA 10071, not a single position of which has been filled.

And why are the positions unfilled? Not for want of trying on the part of the DoJ, it seems. Not that it has no fault — but the major bottleneck is in Malacañang itself where apparently the evaluation process is complicated by partisan and turf-building considerations, so that a relatively straightforward process gets mired in delay. I don’t know whether PNoy is aware of this, but he should certainly look into it.

Just think of what 1,574 additional prosecutors can do — assuming that they are qualified rather than political appointees — to speed up the wheels of justice.

Again, a qualifier: This does not mean that the PNoy hasn’t made excellent appointments — but generally his best appointments turn out to be people who are not politicians, or who do not have political axes to grind, e.g. Albert del Rosario, Babes Singson.

Onward and upward. We hope. –Solita Collas-Monsod, Businessworld

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