At the right place

With the Christmas season just around the corner, Metro Manila residents are bracing for more traffic in the coming days to add to the mad rush to shopping malls. The transport gridlock has been the bane of the four-month administration of President Rodrigo Duterte, one of the unfortunate legacies he has inherited from his predecessors.

Due to obvious lack of vision and long-term planning, these administrations past handed down the traffic jam problems getting worse by the day as the Christmas shopping sprees build up.

That’s why officials of the Department of Transportation (DOTr), led by secretary Arthur Tugade are now getting themselves into tighter spot before the bar of public opinion, if not in trouble with Congress. This is because President Duterte has precisely asked his allies in the 17th Congress to grant him emergency powers to stave off the traffic congestion problems before it turns into national crisis.

The DOTr Secretary promised changes for the better when he took the helm of this agency from his traffic-challenged predecessor, former Transportation chief Joseph Emilio A. Abaya Jr. But, admittedly, this is too huge a mandate to be too critical of his ways at this early stage. It is too much to ask to expect instant results from these changes while the freshly installed DOTr chief is also grappling at the same time with the huge problems left behind by his predecessor.

Let’s be fair to the man whom President Duterte chose to lead the transport department. He is after all, one of the very close friends among his classmates during their school days together in Davao City. He is one of the favorite examples of President Duterte as the people whom he named in key Cabinet posts to advise and help him run the government in the next six years.

But even before he could get his bearings in office, Tugade is now being hounded, if not besieged by the clamor for his removal from the Duterte Cabinet. With several lawmakers including Duterte allies ganging up on Tugade, his confirmation is stalled at the bicameral Commission on Appointments (CA).

With Tugade’s fate hanging at the CA, Malacañang would have to wait a little longer to get the proposed emergency powers for the President. In the meantime, we have to grin and bear with hellish traffic in EDSA, Makati and other major thoroughfares around Metro Manila and other major urban areas of the country.

Senator Grace Poe, who chairs the Senate Committee on Public Services supposed to sponsor the proposed emergency powers, is herself in no hurry to push its legislation. She is worried over lessons learned from past experience with the requested emergency powers. “We have to be careful because they want to spend P8 trillion. Can you imagine how much money that is? I said, we will give it but we need to put safeguards,” Poe was quoted saying over the weekend.

Poe reiterated the grant of emergency powers would not be a cure-all or the panacea to dissolve the traffic problems of the country right away. At best, she rightly countered for the DOTr and all the agencies responsible for traffic management and enforcement must implement what can be done for now to at least ensure traffic is moving and not at standstill longer than necessary.

Tugade should not content himself as the poster boy of command responsibility in this administration.

This was demonstrated early on in his tenure when chips of asphalt overlaid on the tarmac at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) worsened into large swathes of potholes endangering commercial aircraft and passengers. Tugade bravely faced the media and the angry public, the passengers, and gallantly accepted command responsibility for obvious failure of the previous NAIA management.

It wasn’t his fault, largely. But Tugade cited the principle of due diligence, often done in transition of asset sales in the private sector and seldom in transfer of power in government, or their failure to do so. Just the same he owned up responsibility – a trait rarely found among public officials.

That was why such rare gesture generated brownie points and good public relations for Tugade. It was a whiff of fresh air, so to speak, from the past whose self-indulged do-gooders always point the blame to the administration previously before them.

Speaking of NAIA, frequent fliers take note that flight delays are getting far and few these days. Perhaps, it has something to do with the innovative interventions and management decisions Tugade and his airport men led by NAIA general manager Ed Monreal employed to ease air traffic. He is, after all, a logistics man once immersed in the business of moving people and products from one point to their intended destinations.

To his credit, Tugade reportedly values inputs from his peers and sees potential in people around him. He knows he can’t do it alone and firmly believes in harnessing collective talent to address public woes, like EDSA for example. The secretary made sure that within the first 100 days of the administration, the daily commute along EDSA shall have been shortened.

The DOTr joined forces with other government agencies led by the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) to form the so-called I-ACT, or Inter-Agency Council on Traffic. Although not as significant as the public wants it to be, traffic mess is being untangled and changes are being done to make the grind a little easier.

In a span of only four months, the current DOTr is miles away from what or how the agency was under Abaya. Leadership styles may have something to do with it. But it could have well have been about the dogged resolve to reboot and allow the culture of “responsive governance” to reign from the top.

There will be no shortage of critics, for sure, but Tugade is unyielding in his resolve. He wants it evident, through the initial improvements of the bureaucracy he inherited at the DOTr.  Coming from humble beginnings before he rose to executive posts, Tugade should know the psyche of the people below him and how to lead by example.

When the leadership knows and feels the plight of its publics, and has no tolerance for inefficiency and malfeasance, it cannot go wrong. Having said this, Tugade deserves a chance. The man’s heart is in the right place.