LuisTeodoro.com

To qualify as a democracy, the first critical requirement for any state is the consent of the governed, and the willingness—in fact the obligation—of those in government to heed their wishes. But you don’t get much of either from the Metro Manila Development Authority these days, thanks to the style of governance of its current chair.

Bayani Fernando was appointed to the post last year on the strength of his reputed success as former mayor of Marikina City. Marikina’s streets are clean, and its legendary roof-high floods things of the past. The current mayor of Marikina is Fernando’s wife, who has “beautified” public places and buildings by painting them pink and green.

While those colors may not say much for her tastes, they do hide rust and grime. And she’s also created small parks with picnic tables, and erected rudimentary urinals in strategic places so males who want to relieve themselves need not look for a convenient wall. The urinals stink, anyway, but at least prevent their users from exposing themselves.

Both are attempts at solutions, but as solutions go, succeed only partially, and at a cost. One can say the same thing about the MMDA’s Fernando’s own efforts to replicate Marikina in the whole of metro Manila.

Residents will tell you it’s best to be careful in Marikina, where the police and traffic enforcers are everywhere, and there’s also a curfew for minors, stiff penalties for littering, as well as fines and jail terms for minors caught smoking. It’s a law and order town close to the hearts of clerks, petty tradesmen, middle-level professionals and the wealthy and powerful, most of whom believe that what this country needs is a large dose of “discipline” in the manner of Singapore, where dropping a cigarette butt on the streets means a 50-dollar fine.

“Discipline” occupies pride of place in the Fernandos’ vocabularies. Bayani Fernando had occasion to perorate on that last June, when in celebration of his first year as MMDA chair he listed among his accomplishments that of instilling “discipline” among the public.

The public, said Fernando, had also become more aware of its surroundings, as well as “learned to establish the limits of one’s rights.” What’s more, he said, the same public has become less cynical about government, by realizing from the MMDA example that government agencies can do something about current problems.

Fernando emphasized that his projects—among them his no left turn schemes to ease traffic congestion, and his campaign to rid sidewalks of vendors whom he insists are not poor, only perennial law breakers—“build character” and encourage “social responsibility.”

In Fernando’s world, a public official is apparently not a public servant, but a teacher and even a parent—a notion that wouldn’t be half bad if it did not assume that citizens are children, and that their officials know best.

In practice, this assumption can lead to ignoring citizen wishes, and officials’ proceeding with government plans despite even reasoned and valid objections from the citizenry. Metro Manilans saw and are still seeing the consequences of this view of governance at work in the case of Fernando’s sidewalk- clearing operations.

Civil society groups have pointed out that Fernando’s assumption that sidewalk vendors are merely perennial law breakers—“recidivists,” as he sometimes refers to them, as if they were all tried and convicted criminals who persist in committing the same crimes over and over—can be seriously challenged. While there are exceptions, sidewalk vending is one of the last resorts of the poor in a society of limited economic opportunities, and where, without that recourse, the only alternative to starving would be crime.

But armed with government statistics—which say that only 11 percent of metro Manila’s population is poor—Fernando has alleged that the sidewalk vendors are not poor. The problem is that the government definition of poverty is patently unrealistic. The government puts the poverty threshold at a family income of P13,000 - + per year, or P1,000 -+ a month. The result of this definition is the kind of statistics that say that sidewalks vendors can’t be poor, only criminal.

In his stubborn insistence that he’s dealing with unreformed law breakers, Fernando has continued with his sidewalk clearing campaign despite protests from people’s organizations, urban poor groups and the sidewalks vendors themselves. While these groups do constitute part of the citizenry, whose views should be paramount in a democracy, Fernando has nevertheless insisted on the wisdom of his campaign.

He’s about to do the same in another case. While this time it’s not sidewalk vendors he has had to deal with, on the matter of his plans for Quezon City’s Katipunan Avenue he has nevertheless made it clear that he will not be moved either.

Environmental groups, residents of the area, the University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila University, and Miriam College oppose the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority plan to remove the service islands as well as the trees along Katipunan. But their opposition is apparently of no import to the MMDA, specially its chair, who announced last week that the plan will be implemented anyway.

The MMDA plan covers the areas from Ateneo to the Katipunan entrance of the University of the Philippines. The intent is to ease traffic congestion along that portion of the avenue, which the MMDA claims causes traffic to back up as far as Marikina and Tandang Sora towards the North. MMDA says the traffic problem is reaching crisis proportions and might soon be unmanageable, and thinks that removing the islands and the trees planted on them should ease the congestion.

MMDA is right—at least about the traffic. Once a quiet, tree-lined street through which only an occasional car passed, Katipunan Avenue since the late1970s has morphed into a commercial area clogged with vehicles during peak office and school hours.

Although the most visible culprits are the cars and other private vehicles that enter and leave upscale Ateneo and Miriam, the causes of the traffic problem include Katipunan’s being linked to C-5, as well as to Commonwealth Avenue via Tandang Sora—actually a narrow extension of Katipunan Avenue.

This has meant a constant flow of traffic both north- and south-bound during much of the day as well as early evening, including trucks, the usual horde of passenger jeepneys, and privately-owned vehicles. It’s a flow usually blocked by the traffic to and from Ateneo and Miriam in the early morning, as well as noontime and late afternoon.

The problem being real enough, the question is whether Fernando’s plan is the appropriate solution—and perhaps even more important, whether that “solution” is worth the cost.

Traffic experts have argued that the plan won’t work, while environmentalists have argued that the environmental costs aren’t worth the supposed advantage of getting the traffic to move faster on Katipunan. The former say that removing the islands would be an invitation to traffic accidents, because it would mix through traffic going to Libis with local traffic headed for the establishments along Katipunan. The latter point out that some of the trees are acacias several decades old, and that they help prevent floods while providing shade.

Fernando, however, will not be moved, and while he has announced that he will listen to suggestions from various groups, the bottom line is that the islands and the trees will have to go, apparently in his belief that solving the traffic problem is a priority higher than any concern for the environment—or the possible rise in vehicular accidents.

The removal of the islands and trees from Katipunan could indeed ease the traffic problem—but as in the case of most of the “solutions” either offered or implemented by Fernando, it will come at a cost he’s willing to overlook but which citizens are not.

But what’s worse than Fernando’s ignoring these details is what’s at the core of his cavalier dismissal of citizen protests and views. It is the assumption that government and its officials know what’s best for a public that they assume is made up of children who require “character-building” and “discipline”.

This is the very same mindset that drives authoritarian governments, with their paternalistic view of the citizenry and their misplaced conviction that they know better than anyone else. That mindset requires only legal sanction—and repressive police and military measures—to be fascism, which claims the state to be superior to citizen rights. Without those elements so far, Fernando’s approach to governance is not yet fascism. But it’s not democracy either.

(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, July 12, 2003)

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