Good politics equals food governance

NO HOLDS BARRED
Ike Señeres

I refuse to believe that good governance is an oxymoron, just like military intelligence as the joke goes. I believe however that there is such a thing as a balanced budget, not as a financial reality, but as a figure of speech that is doable if a government is honest and credible. I hope that no one will say that this too is an oxymoron.

Is it still possible to have an honest and credible government in the Philippines ? This question is country specific, because there are many governments around the world that are honest and credible, and as a result, they are able to deliver good governance, whatever that means. I do believe however that good governance is actually the result of good politics, and I am hoping against hope that that too is not an oxymoron.

If indeed good governance is the result of good politics, then the best way for us to go really is to go back to our means of choosing the people who are tasked to run our government, and the only way towards that end is clean and honest elections, hoping that that too is not an oxymoron!

Veterans in the computer industry say that just because computers are there, we should not computerize for the sake of computerization. Simply put, the goal of computerization is to realize and actualize whatever the defined objectives are, and in this case, the objective really is to have clean and honest elections.

Are computers really needed to have clean and honest elections? The answer is definitely no, because clean and honest elections have been held in many countries without the use of computers. Should it be our objective to have faster results in our election system? The answer is yes, but only as a secondary objective, because the primary objective should be accuracy instead of efficiency.

For the record, we seem to be the only country in the world who is attempting a nationwide roll out of an election system that has not gone through a process of piloting and testing. Good luck to all of us, because the system should have been in place weeks before the actual voting day.

For the record as well, I could be the only person in the country who has formally and legally accepted the challenge of the Commission on Elections for anyone to hack their system, but unfortunately they did not make good on their challenge. Now, Chairman Jose Melo is claiming that their system is hack-free, but how sure is he that it is trouble-free?

Some members of the computer industry criticized me for accepting the Comelec challenge, arguing that the issue is not really hacking from the outside, but cheating from the inside. I actually agree with them, because no matter how secure a system is, anyone who has the keys could open it from the outside, or an accomplice could open the doors from the inside. On this issue, could Chairman Melo say that their system is cheat-free?

A platform is something to stand on, but what we should look at are the people who are standing on it. A platform is presented by a political party, but it should be based on capability and credibility. Capability to deliver based on a track record, and the credibility to stand on their promises, based on their personal characters.

I am not against a multi-party system, but I wish that all political parties would have local chapters that would be actively engaged in local politics as well, in good politics that is. All politics is local they say, and I think that the test of that is to have local party units that will work towards good governance, whether or not they are the party in power.

The political parties have hit the nail by zooming in on poverty as the main issue, but the real issue I think is what they could do beyond poverty reduction. With that, I mean prosperity for the whole country in terms of a bigger economy, translated into bigger disposable incomes for everyone.

Good governance means the good delivery of public services. That is an output that every election winner is expected to achieve. Beyond that, the winners should do more. Protecting and restoring the environment should be expected from all the winners, because no economy could grow without the ecology as the top priority,climate change and global warming included.

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