Where have all the planners gone?

Ike Señeres

AS it is supposed to be, all positions in the government all the way to the undersecretary level are supposed to be permanent items that are reserved only for career bureaucrats, meaning that these are only given to permanent officials. At the risk of stating the obvious, there should be no political appointees from the undersecretary levels all the way down to the levels of the division chiefs. Without going around the bush, you should have noticed that the operative word here is “permanent”, meaning to say not temporary, and not intermittent.

Since we are the only country in the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) that does not follow the parliamentary system, we call our cabinet officials “Secretaries”, instead of “Ministers”. In contrast to the Philippines, the other Asean countries all have “Permanent Secretaries” who are functioning on top of the other deputy ministers, in effect functioning as the “primus inter pares” among them. As it always happens, the “Ministers” would come and go as the administration changes, but there are always the “Permanent Secretaries” who would provide the continuity.

So there you go, you should have noticed by now that the second operative word here is “continuity”, a word that is practically synonymous to “permanence”. In theory, it could be said that only a “Permanent Secretary” could bring about permanence in a Ministry, because that has really nothing to do with his persona or how good or bad an administrator he is. On the contrary, it has everything to do with the long term plans of his Ministry, plans that should be implemented regardless of who sits as the Minister, in effect making the position of the Minister purely ministerial only, and I do not mean that as a figure of speech.

I am not exactly saying that Department Secretaries in the Philippines would seem to be operating as cults of personalities, but it is obvious enough that they are not really expected to implement the long term plans of their respective Departments, much less know what these plans are in the first place. As it usually happens, these Secretaries are expected to come up with their own ideas on how to run their Departments, much of these sounding like opinions really. And as what would also happen, these Secretaries would bring in their own consultants who would come up with some other new plans from out of nowhere, forgetting or not knowing there are already, or there should be long term plans that should already be implemented.

As I see it, all executive Departments should base their long term plans on the Philippine Development Plan (PDPlan) also known as “Ambisyon 2040”, a plan that was prepared by the National Economic Development Authority (Neda) and approved by the President of the Philippines. Looking at it from a global perspective however, there is also a need to align that plan with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, goals that are set to end on 2040. Obviously there is a disconnect between the national and the local targets, but let us just say that that would give us another 10 years to catch up with whatever goals that we will miss by 2030, knowing that we missed so many goals when the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) ended in 2015.

Going back to my earlier point, it should go without saying that all the plans, programs and projects of all the executive Departments should be works in progress towards reaching the goals of the PDPlan on one hand, and the SDGs on the other hand. Of course it could be said that the strategies towards meeting these goals would vary from one Department Secretary to another, but the strategies should always be the same, and that is the attainment of these goals. By the way, it would be relevant to mention here that the budgetary items of the General Appropriations Act (GAA) should also be aligned with both the PDPLan and the SDGs.

It is often said that art is the reflection of society, and that is still true up to now. Having said that, I will now ask who the culprit is in requiring or expecting the Department Secretaries to come up with their own ideas on how to run their Departments? Could it be that these officials are doing so because they are expected to do so? What if the expectations of the people would change, in such a way that they would only expect these officials to implement the plans as these are written, without contaminating these with their own ideas and opinions? Could it be that the actions of these officials are mere reflections of the expectations of the people, who really do not know what to expect?

It is often said that in the United States, roads are built by career engineers who do so even if there are still no people or no cars who would use these roads. In sad contrast, here in the Philippines, there seems to be no career officials who could guide the career engineers to build roads where there are already people who are driving cars in cities that would have traffic congestions, the root cause of which is the lack of planning. If only the career officials are not always replaced by the political appointees, one of them would certainly figure out that there are now more cars in the road, we should add more roads. Plain mathematics really, Mr. Watson!

E-mail: iseneres@yahoo.com