Layers of responsibility

PUNCHLINE

Ike Seneres

There should be no controversy on whether Mr. Anderson Cooper was right or wrong in his coverage of the Tacloban rescue and relief efforts. He reported what he saw, but he probably saw it from a western perspective.

If I am not mistaken, he was probably looking for a local field commander whom he did not meet, and that is the probable reason why he concluded that there was no leader on the scene. To say however that there was no government is a bit of an exaggeration, because government functionaries were in the field, doing what they could under the circumstances.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Cooper issued a follow up statement, saying that he never said that there was “no presence of the Philippine government on the ground in Tacloban”. He further said that he merely reported “the work that is being done and the work that isn’t being done”, which is what a responsible journalist should do. 

As a standard operating procedure, there is always a field commander in every emergency, even in ordinary fire and hostage situations. More often than not, it is the local police chief who becomes the de facto field commander, not unless his role is taken over by the provincial police director or the local mayor as the case may be.

In some cases, the regional police director may also take over, if the provincial governor does not take over. The bottom line is that the government has operational layers of responsibility that automatically kicks in the event of emergency or crisis situations.

The government has already admitted that there was an initial slowness in the delivery of rescue and relief services, and so all debates about that should already stop, and the question now is that how we could move on to do what has to be done, with the government and the people working together.

The government never runs out of critics in everything that it does, but given the circumstances, these critics should just do their part in helping the disaster victims by walking the talk, and not just by talking without any actions.

The charter of the Philippine National Police (PNP) says that it should be national in scope, and civilian in character. It is very clear therefore that the PNP is no longer a military organization, and that the President of the Philippines is no longer the Commander-in-Chief of the police forces.

Since it is national in scope, the PNP should be able to function nationwide without waiting for direct orders from the President. As it is organized, the PNP could very well function given its chain of command, all the way to the top. If orders need to be given at a higher level, the Secretary of the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) could very well do that.

The President was correct when he said that in the Philippines, the first layer of responsibility in dealing with local emergencies is the Local Government Unit (LGU). He was also correct when he said that the national government could take over if the LGU is unable to function.

Further up however, the second layer of responsibility is the provincial government, and the national government should only take over if the provincial government is unable to function. In the case of the present emergency, the provincial government was apparently weakened too, and it is a good thing that the national government already took over as soon as possible.

Funny as it is, we elect a President who is supposed to preside over national affairs, but we expect him to act like a local mayor. We would always expect him to be on the scene right away each time there is an emergency, not content perhaps with the local officials and cabinet officials who are already on the scene, supposedly on his behalf as his alter egos.

When the World Trade Center in New York went down after the 9-11 attack, President Barrack Obama arrived on the scene only after ground zero was cleared. He showed up several days later and all along, it was the local mayor who was actually in charge.

Looking at it another way, we have a Republic, but we are behaving as if we are a municipality. Unlike a municipal mayor, the President has an official cabinet that is supposed to be an extension of his household, being composed of members who are supposed to be his alter egos.

Since the President could not be everywhere doing everything, it should be good enough that his cabinet members are doing things for him, acting on his behalf. In theory, these officials are not even supposed to wait for orders from the President, even if most of us would always want to see him doing that, on national television, no less.

Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that is also used in political science and governance.

It is synonymous to decentralization and delegation. What it simply means is that actions or functions ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized authority capable of addressing these effectively. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as “the idea that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level”.

Subsidiarity is also a democratic principle, and the more we understand it, the more we could become capable of strengthening our democratic government. I could understand why public expectations are media driven, and are almost always based on the issues that are carried on newspaper headlines.

If we are to progress as a nation, we should become more objective rather than subjective. Our expectations should be based more on what our institutions are supposed to do, and not what our emotions are causing us to act, in reaction to what we see in the headlines.

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