Wednesday, January 17, 2007 Osmeña: Sustainable RP government By Antonio V. Osmeña Estatements
TO the delegation of Methodist dignitaries visiting him in 1901, United States President William Mckinley declared that he did not know what to do with the Philippines.
He remained undecided, he said, even after he had sought the advice of Democrats and Republicans alike. All he knew was that: (1) “We could not give them back to Spain—that would be cowardly and dishonorable; (2) we could not turn them over to France or Germany—our commercial rivals in the orient—that would be bad business and discreditable; (3) we could not leave them to themselves —they are unfit for self-government, and they would soon have anarchy and misrule worse than Spain was.”
Only after many nights of praying for divine counsel, he said, did the decision to keep the Philippines come to him.
“There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them,” he said. The next day, President Mckinley instructed the chief engineer of the war department to put the Philippines on the US map.
In 1946, the Filipino people had their political independence from the United States of America. Today, the Philippine government is patterned after the US Constitution, which calls for three major loops and control subsystems — the legislative, executive and judicial branches —all connected by multiple checks and balances, or negative feedbacks.
For the entire system to work, all three branches and the people must cooperate and interact. The grand design of the Constitution is like a finely balanced watch with gear and springs moving and responding at different lag times.
For immediate response, there is the executive branch. But to avoid hasty changes and to ensure responsiveness to the diversity of national interests, the Congress was created. It, in turn, contains two cybernetic loops —the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The House of Representatives has the faster response time, because its members are elected every three years. The Senate, whose members have six–year terms, can take a slightly longer view and guards against abuse of power by the executive branch.
The counterbalance to the entire system is the Supreme Court, whose members are appointed nearly for life.
Unfortunately, the 61 years of generations of politicians since our independence have failed to correct the system we adopted, which contains a number of defects that can seriously hinder the transition to a sustainable Philippine society.
The major cybernetic weaknesses in our government system are: (1) absence of a permanent and effective mechanism for developing and institution long-range forecasts and plans; (2) disproportionate influence in government by special interest groups; (3) inadequate information flow within Congress, and between Congress and the public; (4) the bureaucracy bottleneck; and (5) failure to ensure the election of sustainable earth leaders.
The government established by the Constitution was not designed for efficiency. Instead, it was designed for consensus and accommodation as key to survival. Thus, by staying as close to the middle of the road as possible, the government muddles through crises.
As the saying goes: “Our democracy is like a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always in the water.”
Until elected officials cannot solve the cybernetic weaknesses of our government, no amount of constitutional changes can alleviate the economic opportunity of the Filipino people.
It is suggested that with presidential elections, disproportionate influence by powerful and well-financed interest groups could be diluted by active citizens’ lobby and the public financing of elections, with no outside contributions allowed.
The two-party system should be revived and the multi-party system, which has caused the stagnation of our country’s economic growth, should be abolished.
