Low-hanging

Over the weekend, President Rodrigo Duterte signed and delivered an executive order providing for freedom of information in the Executive Branch.

How simple that was. It was all a matter of listing down what was allowable and what was not, then providing penalties for non-compliance.

How could it have taken us so many years to do this?

When Noynoy Aquino ran for the presidency in 2010, he promised a freedom of information bill. Then he hedged. Then he hedged some more, citing this or that complication.

The truth was the bureaucracy stood against it. It was just a bother. It will cause all the useless rituals the guardians of state secrets would rather not put up with.

In the end, Aquino himself lost the thirst for it. His underlings convinced him this was a pointless exercise. He used the awesome powers of the Executive over the Congress to block the Order.

He could have, as Duterte eventually did, opted to issue an executive order to make his campaign promise a reality in one branch of government. But that would have required some out-of-the-box thinking Aquino might not be capable of.

Aquino must have been so busy in his last days in office he ignored signing several bills on his desk. One of them simply lapsed into law the other day since Aquino did not attend to them.

Those Aquino found extraordinarily provocative he vetoed. The previous president had the most number of bills vetoed.

Considering his clout, this is such a waste of legislative resources. He could have used his Presidential Legislative Liaison Office work a little harder to temper proposed bills Aquino disagreed with. But that would have required a presidency with its nose to the wheel, not one with its head in the clouds.

Duterte, by contrast, shows Aquino how to do things.

In three weeks after assuming office, he signs an executive order providing for freedom of information in one branch of government. The gesture itself won acclaim from the media. We can split hairs on what ought to be included and what should not. The point is we have a signed document.

This is a document pregnant with political repercussions. It exerts tremendous pressure on the Congress to finally enact a law guaranteeing public access to non-vital information in all parts of government.

Henceforth, it will be a great challenge for Congress to continue resisting public clamor for a more transparent information regime. It is in the nature of our time to have more transparency.

It is in the nature of our democracy to be more and more unrestricted in the flow of information.  We cannot have censors at every turn deciding what could be made public and what could not.

A freedom of information edict is a low hanging fruit ripe for the picking. Signing the document is consistent with the ethos of our time.

Besides, and this is where statesmanship comes into play, this edict will help offset criticism that the new government is too harsh or too heartless in its approach to the drug problem.

911

By August, we are told, a 911 number will be available for our citizens. That is good news.

For an economy that takes pride in being one of the major business process outsourcing centers, it has always been a wonder why our national police did not have a single emergency number. Other countries have had it for years.

I imagine all an emergency number requires is a designated network, a staff complement and a good information relay. The PNP should have all of those.

If we did not have a 911 number, this could only be the result of some failure of the imagination.

For years, when he was SILG, Mar Roxas talked endlessly about his pet program called Lambat-Bitag. This probably has its merits but it did not address that yawning public safety concerns – especially about drug use.

There can be no more efficient force-multiplier than an effective police communications system. A small force can cover a larger population with a good communications system. The investment in a good system will more than compensate for the cost.

I suspect that the retardation in the development of our police communications system is due to the police themselves.

For too long, the PNP operated much like fiefdoms where boundaries are inviolable and the force is not interoperable. There is a reason for that. Lack of interoperability allowed the territorial subdivisions to prevent outsiders from interfering in their domain.

Remember that near-clash between units of the PNP a couple of months ago?

What happened than appears to be a case of PNP units violating artificial territorial frontiers. When that happens and the communications system is weak, it is easy to imagine wrong encounters happening.

The solution stares us in the face. Improve communications, improve interoperability. Yet no one until now seemed ready to act on that.

There is more than just the availability of a 911 number here. Indicated here is a dedication to deliver what the police is committed to deliver, using the very best technology available.

When we speak of our general weakness in infra, it is not only the “hard” items such as roads and bridges we lack. It is also the “soft” items such as the willingness to rethink how we do things.

This 911 number is one of those things we should have thought about long before. It is another low-hanging fruit.