Wednesday, September 17, 2008 Valdehuesa: Unless educated people act, trapos dominate By Manuel Valdehuesa Street Talk
YOU can talk as much as you like about wanting good governance, but nothing will improve unless you help govern your immediate community, institutionalizing autonomy or self-governance. It is one's participation in local governance that conditions the conduct of the upper levels - whose officials derive their mandates from the votes of our neighborhoods.
Complaining about the top leadership leads us nowhere unless we fix the trapo leadership below. It's the grassroots that support all levels up to the top and make it possible for big trapos to take advantage of the weaknesses of the system. But we have this terrible habit of entrusting our community to trapos. It doesn't seem to strike anyone that the little trapos running our neighborhoods are beholden to the big trapos above, serving as errand boys and girls of big-time abusers, plunderers and bribers.
Respectable people who don't show they care one way or the other about the quality of grassroots leadership in effect give the trapos a franchise on neighborhood politics. Why else can they manipulate neighborhood events and voting patterns with ease? So long as they hold this franchise, there is no hope of ever reforming governance at any level. It's they who set the terms of political engagement today; they dictate the standards by which people decide who should govern.
Sad to say, the so-called respectable or honest citizens have no normative contribution to public affairs. They're supposed to be educated. But they seem ignorant of the essence of democracy, which is citizen sovereignty - a notion that means nothing unless it is asserted and which, if neglected, throws governance to the wolves and makes a mockery of development and social justice. Is it possible they don't know that all that is necessary for evil, incompetence or ignorance to triumph is for good people to do nothing?
It's not right for a responsible citizen to grant trapos a perpetual license to victimize the poor and the impressionable. It is wrong to allow them to use or abuse taxpayer money to advance their self-interest. And it's certainly not right that they're the only ones who bother to look in on the barangay hall, there to play political games that victimize unsuspecting people as pawns.
Allowing them free play, affording them uninhibited use of public facilities and resources, enables them to shape the community's political culture. Their values become the values of the neighborhood. Their character becomes the local role model, their vices the community's vices. Do they gamble? How can gambling be eradicated or minimized? Do they cheat, buy votes or lie and plunder? How prevent cheating and lying and stealing? Do they act like dictators? How will democracy mature?
For lack of alternate models, the trapo patron has become the political idol of the masses. That's why they have a stranglehold on the entire political system. Being in control of the primal base of Philippine society; they shape its manners, customs and political behavior. The attitudes, values and practices they implant into this basic community become those of society at large. That's why they are able to make the political system march to their tune.
Meanwhile, no one bothers to offer a different tune. No one orients the community about the law, about how it empowers even ordinary people to manage their own affairs. Thus the notion of autonomy is vague, abstract to the man on the street. He thinks all the power is lodged at the municipal or city hall on in Malacañang. He doesn't know that that was before when the barangay government had no power, no money, no facilities. It doesn't help that barangay officials also think so, kowtowing to municipal or city officials instead of to heed their constituents in the neighborhoods.
Reforming this atrocious attitude, amending this corrupted behavior, is not an easy task. But it is attainable if even a few educated barangaynons awake to their responsibility as citizens. A small circle of responsible citizens can make a great difference in the community. It can exert a gentle but sustained dose of sovereignty that would impel transparency and accountability to local governance. Unless the political system is reoriented at this level first, the upper levels will always dominate and overpower the voice of the community.
Behavior modification, social change or reengineering a society is always difficult and slow, but it is manageable within the modest scale of a barangay. At municipal or higher levels the task is many times more difficult.
Reforms in the barangay need not be so daunting if educated people learn to act out their convictions right where they reside. Check this out with A.C. Guarin, Susing Arandil, Jigjig Culanag, or Lorie de la Serna! #
A former UN executive and vice chair of the local government Academy, Manny heads the Gising Barangay Movement and writes Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays. Email: valdeman_esq@yahoo.com
