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Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Cabaero: Her failing memory
By Nini B. Cabaero
Beyond 30
The recent last hour appointment of Arthur Yap as presidential adviser on jobs creation showed that President Arroyo suffers from memory loss.
The same post was abolished in an executive order by Arroyo sometime last March. It makes me wonder why the post was suddenly re-created under a slightly different name, for Yap.
The Office of the Presidential Adviser on Jobs Generation was last held by Luis Lorenzo. When Lorenzo resigned from the post last March, President Arroyo issued Executive Order 408 abolishing the office and turning over its functions to the Presidential Management Staff.
Through her spokesman, Arroyo was confident the function of jobs creation could be handled adequately by the PMS. She invoked in her directive another executive order, EO 292 series of 1987, which granted her the power to reorganize an office to achieve “simplicity, economy and efficiency.”
It reminded me of her vow in 2004 to abolish agencies under the Office of the President to downsize government. The move was one of her promises in the State-of-the-Nation Address in July 2004 to address bureaucratic excesses and to cut government spending. In that address, she said “we have to tear away layers of inefficiency piled on by decades of political accommodation, redundancy in the national service, waste in local governments and the pointless procedures for getting done what isn’t needed anyway to secure the public welfare.”
The abolition of Lorenzo’s office upon his resignation last March was seen as part of the trimming of bureaucratic fat.
The re-creation of the office under a new name – Office of the Presidential Advisor on Jobs Creation – with only the last name changed and the appointment of Yap to the post last week raised doubts over Arroyo’s sincerity to downsize government.
Yap was Arroyo’s agriculture secretary who resigned after he was linked to a tax evasion case. He was later cleared of the charge. People in the opposition viewed Yap as an Arroyo protégé who was appointed to the revived post to keep those friendly with the President in the Cabinet.
Yap’s recent appointment is an example of how an office can be abolished and later resurrected without even a tinge of creativity to camouflage the re-creation.
It is not clear what would be the responsibilities of Yap’s new office. But his appointment to an already-abolished position was a reflection of lack of sincerity in the move towards government efficiency.
The absence of logic in Yap’s appointment to the resurrected office opens Arroyo up to calls for transparency. With the doubts, it would be difficult to believe Arroyo the next time she says she would abolish unnecessary and redundant offices. It could be more than memory that is failing Arroyo.
(December 27, 2005 issue)
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