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Saturday,
October 19, 2002
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ROPEROS: ‘Inept’ postal service
By Godofredo M. Roperos
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OUR mail delivery service appears to be the worst in the government today.
After listening to the many tales of woe from friends and kin here in the city and the towns, there is no other conclusion anyone can make about our present postal service. And it seems it is not only the ineptitude the citizenry are complaining about but also their lack of trust and confidence in the people holding fort in our post offices. Our overseas workers are wary of postal pilferage when they send money orders to their families.
Corruption still reportedly haunts most of our post offices in the countryside.
While the top management of the Philippine Postal Service (PPS) has been exerting efforts to contain the problem, success has hardly dented it, so says a regional office postal employee who has long been in the service. The deterioration of the quality of service of the PPS has reportedly driven its clientele to commercial banks and private couriers in the matter of money transfers and telecommunications facilities.
Most of our overseas workers, who experienced the loss of their hard-earned money through the post office, have become wise enough to look for more reliable carriers of “valuable cargo.” Instead of sending money through the mails, they now send their monthly remittances through the banks, or the private telecommunication agencies. A couple of years back, I wrote in this space about two mothers in Toledo City whose daughters’ remittances placed in letter envelopes never reached them.
This is not to say, of course, that our postal service today is shot through with graft and corruption. It is just that when it was converted into a kind of corporate entity midway into the Ramos presidency during the first half of the‘90s, it showed a lot of promise. It was thought then that, managed and operated as an independent corporate body, it could render an even better postal service to the people. I know of many who deeply expressed their disappointment at the way the country’s postal services has instead deteriorated.
This public perception of deterioration has become even more pronounced in the face of the fact that mail deliveries in the towns are not any more extensively done. In many cases, such as in Balamban, a town about to be made a city on Cebu’s northwest coast, the citizens are now asked to go to the Post Office to get their mails. No one delivers the mails now since the half dozen or so mailmen of the early ‘90s have become “victims” of attrition. The resigned, retired or dead have not been replaced.
In Cebu City the mail delivery system has grown even worse, according to a practicing lawyer friend who decried the fact that legal notices sent within the city takes a week or more to reach the addressee. Our friend, whose office is a mere walking distance from the Palace of Justice behind the Provincial Capitol, tells of how a notice of postponement of hearing was mailed to him from the Capitol Post Office.
But his office received the notice many days later, on the day of the hearing when he had just returned from the court.
The point is that, at the moment, our postal service has lost public dependability on its delivery system. It is, in fact, quite difficult to develop trust and confidence in our postal service in general, considering that it has clearly given up its key area of effectiveness in favor of the public sector. Where before the country’s communication system was clearly the domain of the PPS, right now it is in the hands of a good number of entrepreneurs that assures their clientele of efficient service, delivering mails or packages in 24 hours.
What would have been almost a monopoly of the PPS, in terms of operational advantage with post offices all over the country as its operational arms, has been practically wasted from sheer neglect. Or could it be by design? In any case, it would take some serious efforts to regain the prestige and public trust the postal service has lost over the years. Its top management, though, may have a hidden reason for the way it has squandered the competitive edge it used to have. If it has, the public would like to know about it.
“And if it doesn’t have,” a coffeeshop friend said, “well, maayo pa i-privatize na lang, including the postal savings bank. GMA can surely make good use of the money.”
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