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Manny Valdehuesa .

GOOD governance promotes productivity, progress, and a contented community—which are at once its result and its reward. Does your barangay enjoy good governance?

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Bad governance creates stagnation, unhappiness, and despair. It arises where incompetence, corruption, or abuse obtains—on the part of either or both the officials and the citizens. It is for peace and order, bad for solidarity, opening the way to criminality, impunity, or worse.

Note for instance how insurgency starts and grows in communities (barangays) where living is constrained by social or economic inequality, by animosity or sectoral disharmony—conditions that its government is unable to address. Bad governance turns a community into fertile ground for an insurgent cause or ideology to sprout.

And the situation cannot be remedied unless the citizens take their governing duties seriously. Taking advantage of citizen apathy, officials become careless about their duties, commit abuses, or let others do as they please with impunity.

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Citizens cannot afford to leave governance entirely in the hands of their officials. Citizens must be attentive and alert, able to straighten out anomalous conditions or to correct wayward behavior.

Without attentive citizens, a barangay’s mechanism for checks and balances becomes inoperative. Nothing and no one can rectify or sanction negligence, dereliction of duty, poor performance, or criminal activity in the ranks.

In time, dissatisfaction and unhappiness will dull the collective mind of the community, causing the adventurous in its neighborhoods to protest and defy the authorities, or to stage an uprising.

Think of Marawi City. Were its citizens attentive, sensitive to the brewing insurgency?

Apathy weakens a community’s political will, its sectors readily manipulated, further weakening it. Badly motivated sectors can turn to insurgency and take over the power and authority the citizens do not bother to assert or exercise.

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Bad governance thrives on citizen unconcern; on their lack of assertive sovereignty. Whatever commitment or conviction some upright citizens may harbor is watered down by the neglect or passivity of the rest, making everyone vulnerable to negative influences.

Ultimately, the general wellbeing suffers, rocked by resentment, defiance, and rebelliousness in the absence of checks and balances. “Checks and Balances” is the system in which the different parts of an organization—in this case, the government—possess powers that affect and control the other parts so that no part can become too powerful.

In our system, checks and balances for the upper governments (municipal to national) is assured by the separation of powers among the three branches.

The executive branch possesses veto power. The legislative branch can override decisions of the executive and the judiciary. The judiciary have power of judicial review, checking the acts of the other two. Each branch restrains the others from exerting too much power, assuring balance and stability to the bureaucracy.

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But in the barangay, there is no separation of powers since it has a parliamentary form of government and its three branches are headed by one and the same official: its Chairman or Punong Barangay.

With the three branches presided and controlled by the head official only, there is no built-in mechanism for checks and balances. The law remedies this, however, and provides a foil against abuse by the powerful Chairman through the instrumentality of the Barangay Assembly, which is a legislative governing body or parliament.

It is in fact the supreme authority in the barangay, with powers of recall and initiative—meaning, its members can discipline or remove the chairman and other officials, or pass and nullify an undesirable ordinance. Collectively and directly, they serve as the moderating force to the concentrated powers of the Chairman.

It is only in his barangay that a Filipino can wield his sovereign power directly. At upper levels, his powers are exercised by proxies or representatives (mayors, governors, congressmen, the president).

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Anyone who neglects or disregards his Barangay Assembly and his role in its proceedings deprives his community of the checks and balances necessary for its good governance.

Not only that, he turns direct democracy (government by the people) into an oligarchy (power wielded by a few) or an autocracy (one-man rule, where the chairman behaves like a commander or “kapitan”).

No one should neglect or abdicate his role in the barangay’s direct democracy. To do so is to marginalize one’s self and one’s neighbors, causing one’s powers and functions to be arrogated by the officials.

Then there is no one and no unit in the barangay’s administrative structure that can check anomalies among its three branches, which are managed and entirely controlled by the chairman. The barangay becomes a captive of its few officials, an oligarchy. And that’s bad governance!

Government is everybody’s business; if you’re not involved, you can’t expect good governance! Does Atty. Titot Neri know this?

 

(Manny Valdehuesa Jr. is a former Unesco regional director for Asia-Pacific; secretary-general, Southeast Asia Publishers Association; director, development academy of Philippines; member, Philippine Mission to the UN;  vice chair, Local Government Academy; member, government peace panel during the administration of Corazon Aquino; awardee, PPI-Unicef outstanding columnist. An author of books on governance, he is chairman/convenor of Gising Barangay Movement Inc.. E-mail: valdehuesa@gmail.com)

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