Poe’s list
March 1st, 2004
Presidential candidate Fernando Poe Jr. has released to the media a list of economic and governance experts his campaign spokesman, Rep. Francis Escudero, has described as “the most potent group of economists and planners that can be formed.”
Note the “potent” part. What the Poe camp has put together is a group of advisers, not an economic and governance platform. The specific programs are yet to be formed; they will come later, when—or if—Poe is elected President.
Not one woman is in the list, I hope not because the Poe camp believes that the country has no woman expert in economics and governance. Or worse, that it doesn’t think the concerns of women to be urgent enough to address at the national level. Give it time, however. I suspect that other lists are forthcoming, assuming Poe is not disqualified from running for the presidency.
The credentials of the people Poe and company have put together are impressive nevertheless. Those credentials include doctorate degrees from some of the most prestigious foreign schools including the United States’ Harvard and Yale universities; deanships in the University of the Philippines; decades of research and teaching in the arts of governance and public administration; service in government finance institutions; and business experience.
Although Escudero said that Poe himself had sought the help of these experts, there is no way that Poe could have known who and what to look for and where—except, in the manner of anyone with any sense of where the country’s intellectual resources are—in the general direction of the country’s elite schools, meaning UP, De La Salle, and Ateneo de Manila. (The latter is for some reason not represented at all in the Poe list—which, however, also includes at least one professor from the more plebeian Polytechnic University of the Philippines, or PUP.)
My guess is that Joseph Estrada’s brother- in- law Raul de Guzman, a retired professor of UP’s National College of Public Administration and Governance, recruited the UP academics in the list.
In 1998 De Guzman had provided Estrada the same service, in response to complaints about the latter’s limited acquaintance with economics and governance, among others. To dispel the vast reservations in the business community and civil society over his intellectual and administrative abilities, in 1998 Estrada’s camp released a list of some 40 advisers in virtually the same fields. Once Estrada was elected, some of these experts ended up in his administration, among them UP’s Benjamin Diokno (Budget) and Felipe Medalla (National Economic and Development Authority), both from the UP School of Economics.
If history seems about to repeat itself, it’s likely to be as farce. There’s no escaping the sense of déjà vu, except that this time the complaints and lamentations are even louder than in 1998. In one more demonstration of how the standards of Philippine civilization, such as it is, have declined, Estrada is actually now regarded as better qualified, though only when compared to Poe. Estrada after all served as mayor of San Juan, Senator, and Vice President before he became President. And, for all his mumbling, he’s significantly more articulate, and even more coherent, than his compadre.
The galloping perception that Estrada may not have been the nadir of incompetence among presidential aspirants—a perception due largely to Poe’s inarticulateness—plus the fact that the tidal wave of voter support the Poe camp has been saying since December will swamp President Arroyo, former senator Raul Roco and Senator Panfilo Lacson has not materialized, have made the release of the Poe list necessary.
As impressive as the credentials of most of the people in the list are, however, few people in the A and B segments of the population seem to have been assured that a Poe government will not lead the country to a disaster even worse than its current state.
At the top of these reasons is the demonstrated failure of the Estrada government, despite its forty advisers, to arrest the country’s economic decline and to improve governance. The failure was primarily the result of Estrada’s inability to govern wisely, despite having at his beck and call some of the country’s leading political scientists and public administration experts.
Some of these advisers, including those in the Estrada Cabinet, have since revealed that Estrada chose to listen to his other “advisers”—the midnight Cabinet made up of his drinking and gambling cronies among whom some pushed papers for him to sign in between swallows of Johnny Walker—rather than the experts. At times he would listen to both, approving well-thought out policy decisions during the day only to contradict them in the wee hours of the morning. In effect, said one former Estrada Cabinet member, Estrada had constructed a structure of unofficial advisers parallel to his official ones.
One doesn’t need a doctorate in public administration to realize that whoever’s president has the power to make decisions while advisers no matter how expert can only advise. And the decisions finally made and how they’re made are shaped by a variety of factors, among them the decision-maker’s personal interests, his sense, or lack of it, of the consequences of his or her decisions, his or her biases, and others.
Every president with an iota of sense knows that he can’t possible know everything, which is why presidents hire advisers. The best of advice, however, means nothing unless translated into policy and the decisions that have to be made in its implementation.
This implies the need not only for a clear vision, but also for a minimum of administrative sense on the decision-maker’s part. Which advice to follow cannot be resolved by tossing a coin or consulting Madame Auring, but by weighing the advice on the scales of public interest, and what one wants to achieve.
As far as the latter is concerned, what we have so far from Fernando Poe Jr. is the assurance that he wants a “better Philippines.” This is a desire against which no one can argue. As a vision it doesn’t amount to much unless it is fleshed out in specific terms.
Does he, for example, envision a better Philippines in the sense that it will be an industrialized country whose citizens need not leave kith and kin for jobs abroad, and whose children will be more than domestics and workers in alien cultures? The decisions a President Poe will be making on which advice to follow will be shaped by his vision—or by his lack of one. One possible consequence is decision-making guided by nothing but the worst of instincts, resulting in the same policy incoherence the country saw during the Estrada administration, and equally evident in the Arroyo watch.
But if the lack of ideological moorings is dangerous in any government, of equal concern would be a government’s being the captive of a particular clique with a less than open agenda. Intellectually-challenged presidents, perhaps more than presidents focused on being elected, are especially prone to being so hijacked. Certainly no genius, US President George Bush, for example, has become the captive of the neo-conservatives and their drive for total world dominance through the use of force.
This captivity has had the direst consequences for both the United States and the rest of the world. The Philippines is far from being in the same league as the world’s only superpower. But the harm to the country the hijacking of a Poe presidency by a clique focused on dominating policy-making in the furtherance of a questionable agenda can be devastating.
Such a hijacking can occur naturally, given Poe’s glaring handicap. We can expect close collaboration among certain personalities in Poe’s senatorial slate and some of his advisers, for example between Opus Dei comrades Francisco Tatad and the economist Bernardo Villegas, whose name was prominently mentioned by Escudero.
For starters, we have been assured by Villegas that after sessions with him and reading his essays, Poe is now supportive of globalization, and is opposed not only to artificial means of family planning. He’s opposed to family planning itself, which Villegas says is “counter-productive and obsolete.”
These statements should be enough to give everyone pause. As impressive as the credentials of Villegas and company are, what really matters is the kind of advice they’ll be dispensing, and who among them will have the ear of a Poe presidency.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, February 21, 2004)