LGUs shine
The novel coronavirus pandemic has caught us all off-guard. COVID-19 started in Wuhan, China, late in December. We in the Philippines were alerted in January but the potential impact of the outbreak escaped our attention.
Wrote Richard Heydarian in the Nikkei Asian Review: “Almost two weeks into the Wuhan lockdown, Duterte nonchalantly claimed that ‘everything is well. There's nothing really to be extra scared of that coronavirus thing’ since it will eventually ‘die on its own.’”
It did not. When I first wrote about the virus outbreak in my January 25 column, there were still 830 cases with 25 deaths recorded in China. As of the latest count this week, the number of COVID-19 cases has already topped 200,000 with over 10,000 deaths and 88,000 recoveries. And Europe has become the new epicenter of the pandemic.
During that time I wrote: “Some people on social media are quick to chide others who have shared information and advisories online about the 2019-nCov. But I don’t share their criticisms. There is no such thing as ‘prematurely’ calling for alert and vigilance about the spread of the deadly infection.”
I could have also stressed then that the country must start preparing for such an outbreak. Now I say that we should not expect to go back to the way things were before the pandemic. Experts predict that social distancing is here to stay “for much more than a few weeks” and that “it will upend our way of life, in some ways forever.”
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The national government has drawn some flak in social media for its seeming lack of preparation. Limited number of test kits are still starting to be downloaded to the regions, with some local government units (LGUs) taking the initiative of ordering their own test kits. Bulk orders, we are told, are soon expected to arrive from abroad.
To be fair, the national government is now acting aggressively to prevent the deadly virus from overwhelming our public health system. Considering the national government’s command of the vast resources of the state, the people naturally have higher expectations of its role.
But it is the LGUs that are now looked up to by their respective constituents to fill in the gaps, and rightly so because the LGUs know the needs of their residents better and feel directly responsible for those immediate needs.
Surprisingly, at around 1:30 in the morning yesterday, the president again appeared on national television. This time it was to warn LGUs who may be acting out of line with the national government’s role in this crisis. I get the point of the president, that we are one republic and LGUs must follow national government directives. But he could have communicated that directly to the concerned LGUs in a memo sent through his department heads.
His admonition didn’t strike a good chord among his critics and even among neutral observers. But that’s beside the point now. We expect that a time of great crisis will always test the capacity of a centralized and hermetic system of governance. There will be a time to study such institutional void of policy making in a pandemic. More urgent now is the need for the national government to work with the LGUs, empower them with more funds, and communicate with them the broader realities in our public health system.
In a study done by Chambers, Barker and Rouse (2012) entitled “Reflections on the UK's approach to the 2009 swine flu pandemic: Conflicts between national government and the local management of the public health response,” they observed that “the imposition of a single national approach to managing the pandemic and a disregard for the role of local authorities seriously impaired the ability of local agencies to respond in a flexible, timely and pragmatic way to the rapidly emerging situation.”
They recommended that “future planning for pandemics must recognise that global epidemics are curbed at the local level, and ensure that any response is proportionate, flexible and effective.”
Some LGUs in the Philippines are showing such flexible and effective local level capacity. Pasig City Mayor Vico Sotto, for example, is getting a lot of accolades in social media and mainstream media regarding his creative and hands-on approach to the crisis in his locality. And a lot of other LGUs are also doing a good job, yet away from the national spotlight. Cebu’s LGUs are among them.
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