Unmasking a privatized government

Public enterprise and institutional efficiency are not necessarily contradictory notions. Relatively efficient governments exist in Sweden, Switzerland, Singapore and Taiwan among others. Yet these are the very exceptions that prove the rule. In most countries, governments and government intrusion into most aspects of everyday life are characterized by inefficiency and attended by extensive graft and corruption. On the other hand, private initiative and private management are normally competitively oriented and are popularly expected to wind up as efficient going concerns or as non-viable and bankrupt propositions.

The controlling assumption of private management is a relatively free and competitive environment with its implacable system of institutionalized rewards and penalties. Where this assumption is compromised by chronic government intervention to favor selected sectors, firms and cronies, private management is corrupted and is better understood as a fronting mechanism for the authorities and their preferential partners. In this set-up, what appears to be private management is really an unduly favored, crony group and what appears to be the lead public enterprise — government – is no more than a masked, privatized and often enough plundering operation.

The most corrupt operations of government take place in such an environment. The authorities and their managerial lackeys trumpet the public interest as their consuming passion even as they also unrelentingly pursue their most private ends. Past administrations — Marcos’ own being only the most prominent and most craven of a sad lot – often reflected this unfortunate tendency. The present Arroyo dispensation too appears unable to distance itself enough from its predecessors. Much like the animals in Orwell’s satire, Animal Farm, more and more Filipinos might ask what differentiates the current regime from the one it purportedly disestablished in the recent EDSA Dos "revolution".

Unless a truly decisive, visionary leadership takes over the helm of government, there is reason to believe that needed reforms in the political system will take much time gestating. It may not be feasible to demolish the private character of a government and substitute an uncompromisingly public orientation in its place within a generation. Perhaps the most we can realistically target for is some degree of transparency in a political system’s dynamics. In particular, transparency may have to be mandatory for every government operation involving a pre-determined level of public funds and other resources of a public nature.

How is privatized government to be unmasked in this country? Certainly not by the constitutional and legal agencies that are now formally tasked to expose this particular political anomaly. So far, all our constitutions and laws have failed to endow the political system with requisite transparency to prevent national plunder from being perpetrated. The main reason has to be that far too many Filipinos continue to mistake for a democratic polity what legal rhetorical veils have so successfully masked – an enduring oligarchy.

The unmasking of a privatized government must necessarily be a mass undertaking. In every agency and at all levels of government, there already exists much reliable information on the politically powerful and the economically influential, the networks which link their multiple private interests, as well as the mechanisms which they activate to guarantee the viability of their nefarious operations. The main challenge lies in systematically collecting, collating, analyzing and disseminating the various pieces of information which together chart the effective privatization of a government. One may expect some conscientious individuals or groups in government to take part in this sensitive work. However, the greater burden would realistically have to be borne by people and groups who are not in government.

This is actually the case even now. Private sector, academic and religious institutions, civic-minded associations, various cause-oriented groups and even simply concerned individuals are already undertaking this kind of critical work. For a critical mass of such workers to exist and for their work to be irreversibly influential in governance, even more groups and more people will have to be recruited, Their efforts will also have to be much more carefully supervised, even more skillfully coordinated and, finally, politically better organized. Those who would unmask a privatized government can succeed only when they master the art of political empowerment.

These crusaders’ informative reports – their political transparencies – will chart political and economic influence (and ill-gotten affluence) in government as well as in the greater community. They will list and cost-benefit every major government undertaking, identifying formal and behind-the-scenes proponents, those who in fact bear the greater cost of a program or project as well as those who actually largely benefit from it. Furthermore, they will monitor the progress of all government efforts requiring public funds as well as other public resources.

All of these governance tasks are formally already assigned to constitutional and statutory agencies; all of these responsibilities are already identified with numerous government bodies. Practically all of these government agencies and their respective authorities appear to be feckless in discharging their sworn responsibilities. When, left largely to itself, government consistently fails to work for the public interest, those governed cannot be faulted for actively intervening to make their government work better.

Much of this work will expectedly be branded subversive for it undermines the ability of oligarchical government to rule by illusion. As the authorities move against those who would unmask their oligarchy, they would be joined by their historical victims — the awakened public who are now their legitimate tormentors – in a singular admission: neither party can sweet talk the other into yet another illusion of reconciliation and national unity. In the new millennium, EDSA’s 1986 and 2000 romance promises to wear even thinner, as thin as the edge of a knife a kapit-sa-patalim public may be driven to use in defining and serving the public good.#

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