RATIONALIZING PROVINCIAL DEVELOPMENT PLANNING

NO HOLDS BARRED (075) June 27, 2010
By Ike Señeres

RATIONALIZING PROVINCIAL DEVELOPMENT PLANNING

With a new batch of provincial governors either elected or reelected, the provinces now have a fresh opportunity to plan or re-plan the course of their local development, as the case may be. As they face this new or renewed challenge, they also have to reckon with the additional tasks of dealing with both climate change and global warming.

In theory, the provincial governments are supposed to organize and work with the so-called Provincial Development Councils (PDCs), but in actual practice, it is unfortunate to note that many PDCs are not operational, and even if they are, they seem to be lagging behind in their work. It is now up to the local people to demand for the activation of their own PDCs, that is if they want any development to happen in their own provinces.

I believe that there is something that is fundamentally wrong in the present structure of the PDCs. The mayors of component cities and towns are supposed to be members, but there seems to be no apparent consciousness that they are attending the meetings (if they do) not as individual persons, but as heads of their official city or town delegations.

In the Local Government Code (LGC), the “towns” are referred to as the “municipalities”, but I will write here again, as I have always written, that we need to use “municipalities” as the collective term to refer to both the cities and the towns. There is also trouble in the use of the term technical “component”, because it excludes the so-called “chartered” cities, even if they are physically located within the province.

For all intents and purposes, the PDC is supposed to be the clearing house of all municipal development plans (hence the need for a collective term), prior to the integration of the provincial development plans, in preparation for submission to the Regional Development Councils (RDCs). In turn, the RDCs are supposed to prepare their own regional development plans.

How in the world could the PDC prepare a real comprehensive and a fully integrated provincial development plan if the chartered cities are not part of their rounds of meetings? Even if the legal fiction exists that the chartered cities are technically not part of the provinces, how could they deny the fact that the chartered cities are economically, biologically and geographically part of their physical province?

The LGC stipulates that the Congressman or his representative is supposed to be a member of the PDC. It is unbelievable, but the law actually gives the Congressman the built-in excuse not to attend the PDC meetings, leaving him out of any substantive discussions that are directly related to the integrated development planning of his own constituency.

In theory, the Countryside Development Fund (CDF) is supposed to a remedial fund that will address the local needs of a congressional constituency that could not be “seen” or “appreciated” by Congress as a whole. If that is really the case, then why not subject the CDF to the disposition of the PDC, instead of the subjective determination of the Congressman?

By design, the municipal development plans are supposed to be funded by the Internal Revenue Allocations (IRAs) of the municipalities (this being my suggested collective term). In reality however, the IRAs are almost always not enough to fund the local needs, hence the suggestion that it should be beefed up by the CDF.

Also by design, the LGC allows the municipalities to enter into creative financing options in order to finance the components of their municipal development plans that could not be funded by their own revenue collections, and by their IRAs. These options include joint venture agreements (JVAs) with the private sector, and the build-operate-transfer (BOT) schemes (there are several such schemes).

By now, it should be known to all municipal and provincial officials that the business process outsourcing (BPO) approach is working very well for the private sector. Since for all intents and purposes the BPO scheme is allowed under the LGC, they should now look into this additional option. The BPO approach makes good sense for them, because it would free them from the need to buy their own equipment and to hire their own additional staff.

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A BLUE AND GREEN DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK

NO HOLDS BARRED (074) June 20, 2010
By Ike Señeres

A BLUE AND GREEN DEVELOPMENT FRAMEWORK

The green advocacy is now very popular, and that is good news for everyone in this planet. Green is not everything however, because human beings have other needs that have nothing to do with being green. This is the reason why I think there is a need for another advocacy that could be in tandem with the green advocacy, and that is the blue advocacy.

Blue is the color of renewable energy, and it is also the color of good connectivity. This is the reason why a solar powered building is called a “blue building”, and the reason why a blue light turns on in your computer when you are connected to a network wirelessly.

There have been many attempts to define and quantify the number of basic human needs. On my part however, and for purposes of developing an attainable and sustainable development framework, I now propose that we define eight priority human needs, namely livelihood, transportation, health, education, water, sanitation, food and shelter, not necessarily in that order.

If we have energy, we could have more access to livelihood and transportation. Livelihood is the answer to poverty, being the answer as well to increasing the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as defined in the Human Development Index (HDI). Transportation is directly related to livelihood, because people could not go to work if they have no means of mobility.

If we have connectivity, we could have more access to health and education. Health is the answer to high mortality, as defined also in the HDI. In addition, child health and maternal health are two specific Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Education is the answer to illiteracy, as also defined in the HDI. Universal education is also an MDG.

If we sustain our ecology, we could have more access to water and sanitation. These two resources actually work in tandem with each other, because without water, there could be no sanitation. It goes without saying that in order to have clean potable water; we also have to clean our land, including what goes below the surface of our soils. Sanitation is the answer to the problem of pollution.

If we sustain our agronomy, we could have more access to food and shelter. In our definition, we should include forestry as part of agronomy, because restored forests could also give us food and shelter. We should also include fisheries in the definition, because that too, is a major source of food, most especially in an aquatic country like ours. Ending hunger is also an MDG.

As it is now, green advocates are moving in a direction that is apart from the direction of blue advocates, still a small movement as of now. My wish is to bring them together in a joint Blue and Green advocacy or BAG for short. I am hoping that this would be a natural union, because the two are very much compatible with each other.

With sustainable ecology, we could have sustainable energy, and vice versa. This is also the case of water. We could create energy out of water, and using energy, we could increase our water resources. With better and broader connectivity, we could market the outputs of our agronomy better and faster, using the powers of electronic commerce.

On one hand, agronomy will give us the inputs to create energy, plant fuels being just an example. On the other hand, cheaper energy will also enable us to irrigate our farms and process our farm outputs, thus giving us more value added for what we could produce out of the soil.

Our eight basic needs are not just for the short term survival of our people now. These are also for the long term survival of our nation in the long run, for the long term. As a people however, we should not just stop with survival as our long term goal. We should go for regional economic dominance, but first, we must survive.

As a people, we could go nowhere without a unified development framework. In the past, I have advocated for Integrated Area Development (IAD) as a framework. I am still doing that, but this time with a new twist, to meld and blend the eight basic needs within a framework that combines energy, connectivity, ecology and agronomy into one. I would welcome your comments about this framework; let us work on this together.

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POVERTY AND PRODUCTIVITY

NO HOLDS BARRED (073) June 12, 2010
By Ike Señeres

POVERTY AND PRODUCTIVITY

The new Secretary of the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) has yet to be named, but I am hoping that President-Elect Noynoy Aquino would name someone who is both technically honest and intellectually honest in reporting the poverty and prosperity figures of the incoming administration.

Technical honesty and intellectual honesty are two different matters, but they both boil down to the same thing, and that is the moral fiber of the agent, in this case the one who prepares the report (the NEDA Secretary), and the principal, in this case the one who receives the report (the President).

For many years now, the NEDA has been reporting very low poverty figures that are far below the perception of many observers as to what the real figures really are. This seems to be true also in the case of the national productivity figures, which do not seem to reflect what many believe to be the real indicators.

After nine years in office, it is not really clear how much reduction of the poverty rate was actually achieved by Gloria. She would of course claim that the economy “improved” during her watch, but are we always going to content ourselves with the qualitative claims of our leaders?

With six years ahead of him, President Noynoy now has the chance of reducing our poverty rate and increasing our productivity rate, but this time around, and hopefully unlike Gloria, he would start by having intellectually correct and technically correct benchmarks that would be measured against his actual performance and delivery at the end of his term.

In my personal and technical opinion, I believe that the data gathering for the national poverty and productivity reports should start at the municipal level, and these should be consolidated at the provincial level before these are summarized at the national level. Any other method other than this would amount to fabrications, and are therefore dishonest.

For planning purposes, I suggest that the government should adopt the word “municipal” as the common term that would refer to both the cities and the towns. Also for planning purposes, I also suggest that the government should disregard the legal fiction that the chartered cities are not part of the provinces where they are actually physically located.

In this new global paradigm where climate change and global warming takes the center stage, we should even go beyond the usual artificial political jurisdictions of the provinces, meaning that we should now begin to plan in terms of natural watersheds and biospheres.

Whether we like it or not, we could no longer plan for reductions in the poverty rate and for increases in the productivity rate without taking the stat of the environment into consideration. The same is true in the case of agriculture, because we could no longer plan for good agriculture in a bad or damaged environment.

As an economic indicator, the Gross National Product (GNP) is simply just a measure of national productivity and as such, it should reflect the honest accounting of our real gains and losses, including those that are agricultural and environmental in nature.

Adapting to climate change and global warming is one thing, reducing poverty and increasing productivity is another thing. But not unless the new administration the real relationships between the environment and our economic goals, they could be facing a dual failure in this tandem of interconnected objectives.

The outgoing administration has failed to consolidate their actions in connection with the need to preserve or restore our air, land and water resources. All of the government agencies that are tasked to care for these resources seem to be going into their own separate directions, not realizing perhaps that they are dealing with the same watersheds and biospheres.

Just a postscript to the visit of Al Gore: we paid millions just to hear a foreigner tell us what we already know. What more do we need to know?

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DATA PARITY AND DATA EQUALITY

NO HOLDS BARRED (072) June 06, 2010
By Ike Señeres

DATA PARITY AND DATA EQUALITY

Believe it or not, it actually happens in the Philippines that the laws passed either conflict with each other, or are incompatible when placed side by side. This is the case of the apparent conflict between the Electronic Commerce Act (ECA) and the Philippine Election Automation Law (PEAL), when it comes to the issue of data dominance or data parity, as the case may be.

But first, allow me to backtrack a little. At the time that the ECA was passed, hard copies ruled the day as the dominant data form that was admissible in court as evidence, and as the legal basis for day to day transactions. At that time, there was no recognition yet of the value of electronic data forms, so it became necessary to stipulate in the law that henceforth, there is going to be data parity or equality between the two types of data forms.

When the PEAL was subsequently passed, it made the apparent mistake of stipulating that the electronic data form was going to have dominance over the hard data form. This specific provision was apparently in conflict with a general provision in the ECA, stipulating that after the ECA was passed; all subsequent laws passed in the Philippines must be and should be in line with its provisions.

As the implementing agency of the PEAL, I was expecting the COMELEC to insist upon the dominance of the electronic data form. To my surprise, it was COMELEC Chairman Jose Melo himself who started quoting the provisions of the ECA, while referring to the resolution of issues pertaining to electronic signatures. Right there and then, I concluded that the issue of electronic data dominance was dead in the water, and from that time on, it would appear that data parity is here to stay as a state of being.

Ironically, the much ballyhooed “paperless society” actually never happened, as the electronic age produced more documents that had to be printed, as more people, more than ever wanted their own “hard copies” of the “soft copies” that were actually available online or in storage media.

Long before the election actually started, Chairman Melo had announced to the world that he was against a “hybrid” solution, meaning that he did not want to have manual counting alongside the optical counting. He said this at the time that he was fully confident that the automated system was “hack-free”, without bothering to say whether it was “trouble-free” or not.

As it turned out, the COMELEC was actually moving towards a hybrid situation, because the votes from overseas were in fact counted manually. As it also turned out, many votes that were cast locally also had to be counted manually, after the Precinct Count Optical Scanning (PCOS) machines turned out to be not trouble-free after all.

Just to set the record straight, the past election was not really “automated” in a real sense. Real automation has to be “systemic”, meaning that the entire system has to be automated and not just certain parts of it. For the record, the voting system of the past election was actually still manual, because it used paper forms that had to be manually shaded.

Even the counting itself could not really be considered as automated, because the paper ballots had to be manually fed before these could be optically read. To call a spade a spade, the COMELEC actually used a system of “optical counting”; a low-end procedure that could hardly be called “automated voting”.

Following the rule of data parity, it could be said that the Election Returns (ERs) that were printed out from the PCOS and were manually signed by the Board of Election Inspectors (BEIs) were actually valid and admissible, and were therefore acceptable as the legal basis for the computation of the Certificates of Canvass (COCs).

Many IT experts say that the Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL) will never die. This is a mainframe programming language that was developed in the 1950’s and the 1960’s but it is still being used today. Many think that the Disk Operating System (DOS) is dead, but it is actually alive, because the supposedly modern Windows operating system still sits on top of the archaic DOS. Paper will not die, it will co-exist with ether.

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TRUST AND ACCOUNTABILITY

NO HOLDS BARRED (071) June 05, 2010
By Ike Señeres

TRUST AND ACCOUNTABILITY

In the matter of appointments to the Cabinet, the legal fiction prevails that the nominee, or rather the ministry of the nominee is an extension of the personality of the President, and it is for this reason that the nominee should hold his full trust and confidence. While it is the prerogative of the President to nominate whoever he thinks would hold his trust, the performance and actions of the nominee is also his accountability.

Much has been said about the pros and cons of appointing former allies of Gloria into the Cabinet, and more so in the reappointment of incumbent members of her Cabinet into the incoming official family of the perceived front runner of the presidential race. The bottom line here is that it is the prerogative of the appointing authority, with the caveat that he has to answer for whatever the nominee does or does not do while he is in office.

The legal fiction also prevails that the President is merely the appointing authority, but whoever he appoints still has to be confirmed by the Commission on Appointments (CA). Upon confirmation, it is presumed that the Executive prerogative of appointing whoever he wants is in effect substantiated by the independent authority of the Legislative Branch to confirm the nominations.

Many say that one of the major challenges of perceived presidential front runner Noynoy Aquino is the restoration of institutions that have been destroyed, ignored or bastardized by Gloria. While it is really up to the Legislative Branch to restore the full authority of the CA as an institution, I believe that Noynoy should start the restoration process by not allowing his nominees to hold office until they are confirmed by the CA.

Perhaps it is only in the Philippines where vehicles without official license plates are allowed to go around the streets, for as long as they have makeshift plates saying that it is FOR REGISTRATION. In the same manner that these vehicles should not be allowed to roam the streets until they are registered, cabinet nominees should also not be allowed to sit.

In so many instances in the past, cabinet nominees of Gloria were allowed to assume office even if they were bypassed by the CA, by way of using the legal fiction that they are only holding their offices in an acting capacity. I believe that this practice is fundamentally wrong, because they are not supposed to disburse funds and make critical decisions until they are finally confirmed by the CA.

As part of rebuilding our damaged institutions, Noynoy should now avoid reappointing nominees who are bypassed by the CA on the third attempt. If he will continue the practice of Gloria to perpetually reappoint his nominees after they are bypassed for so many times, he will in effect destroy the purpose of having checks and balances between the independent branches of the government.

While it is in effect an insult to the Legislative Branch to ignore the authority of the CA, I believe that it is also in effect an insult to the bureaucracy to ignore the fact that there are career Undersecretaries who could very well run the respective Departments while the Cabinet nominees are not yet confirmed, thus removing the need for them to sit in an acting capacity.

It is not surprising that Noynoy has announced his intention to reappoint Foreign Affairs Secretary Alberto Romulo. He appears to have the trust and confidence of Noynoy, and it is well within his prerogative to reappoint Secretary Romulo if he wants to. However, given the parameters that I have mentioned earlier, Romulo should take the initiative of not holding office until he is confirmed by the CA, and he should take the lead by not agreeing to function in an acting capacity in the meantime.

I believe that it is unfair to simply brand Romulo as the Chief Diplomat of Gloria, and on that basis conclude that he should not be reappointed. I believe that when he was confirmed by the CA, he in effect became the Chief Diplomat of the Republic, fully vested by the Legislative Branch, and therefore no longer just the private diplomat of Gloria. As the institutional process goes, it should be up to the CA whether to confirm him or not, and if he is indeed confirmed, he should be allowed to reassume his post, period.

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