Public officials need to grasp the idea of ‘enough’
Credit to Author: YEN MAKABENTA| Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2019 18:32:15 +0000
For a New Year wish, I can’t think of anything better for our public life than for our public officials and politicians to learn the principle of “enough.”
At the heart of dysfunction and weakness in our public service, there is the troubling fact that our public officials – both elected and appointed – do not have a working concept of that principle:
1. How much do they believe is enough time served in public service or in public life? Or when is it time to retire from the service after working day-in and day-out for decades as a public servant?
2. For local and national politicians, how many terms and how many years are enough to dedicate to serve the public purpose? When is the time to give up running for elective office, and leave the field to much younger and more able aspirants?
3. For members of Congress, both senators and representatives, “how much is enough pork barrel, enough allowances and enough looting of the treasury,” beyond which they will not go?
4. For top officers of the armed forces and the national police, how much is enough time served in the service of people and country, and how many more re-appointments to civilian offices are enough for them to say, “It is truly time to retire”.
For the regular members of the bureaucracy, both regular and career public servants, the definition is easy. “Enough” is when one has served the regular or required period of service prior to retirement. That is enough, because one has fully earned one’s retirement pay and pension. It is time to take a well-deserved break.
For politicians, there is really no retirement, no matter how completely the electorate may shun them. Politics, to them, is forever. Even after electoral defeat or incapacity due to age, they will keep on trying once more to hop into the fray.
Forever on the public payroll
The hard truth is that many of our public officials, once they experience life on the public payroll, cannot imagine themselves living a life elsewhere. They want to ensconce themselves forever in the public payroll. They covet it, besides the salaries, perks and the bonanza of pork barrel.
This is why members of Congress want to do away with term limits.
This is why after being termed out in a given office, a public official opts to run for another office, even a lower post.
This is why our politics and public life nurture family political dynasties.
This is why we have aberrations, such as the situation in Taguig-Pateros and Makati, where members of two families are running for all the elective offices on offer.
In our political culture, wherein we have no idea of enough, the natural tendency is to demand and ask for “more” and then some “more.” It is easy to go crazy, and hard to stay sane.
I believe if Rep. Rodel Batocabe had accepted being termed out following three terms in Congress, and not shifted his electoral sights to local politics in his hometown in Daraga, Albay, he would probably still be alive today. He could not live with the idea of being out of the public payroll.
I believe that had our legislators individually known from the beginning “what is enough,” the billion-peso pork barrel scam would not have grown the way it did, and senators Bong Revilla and Jinggoy Estrada would not have been ensnared by its web.
Gandhi’s principle of ‘enoughness’
In his inimitable way, Mohandas Gandhi provided penetrating insights on why “enoughness” is so important for the happiness and sanity of human beings. He called it the principle of enoughness.
He starts off from man’s relationship to the environment and Mother Nature.
He wrote: “The earth provides enough to satisfy every person’s need but not every person’s greed. When we take more than we need, we are simply taking from each other or destroying the environment for ourselves and other species.”
Gandhi warned that greed is insatiable. Even Mother Nature cannot sate it.
It is important that we work to take from our environment only that which we need. It’s also important to recognize this in business and in own work environments. Some say that we should view Gandhi’s teaching as an attitude of abundance. If we see the world as having abundance, we’ll be able to tap into our fair share.
If we see the world as having scarcity, then life becomes a struggle.
Lack of limits feeds corruption
In the traditional pork barrel system, before it was transmogrified, there should have been enough pork for every representative and every senator. But when the objective became one of satisfying greed, there could not be enough. The Aquino administration literally had to invent new methods and funds to channel pork.
The psychology of “not enough” and “more” fed the entire pork-barrel scandal, and is the reason why Janet Lim Napoles, despite her lack of schooling, became such a big deal, and why the Aquino administration was so deeply enmeshed from head to toe in this tawdry affair.
The lack of an idea of “enough” made our legislators moral weaklings and totally vulnerable to Napoles, who was prepared to offer them anything or any sum, just to get them to authorize the conversion of their pork barrel allocations into projects for her foundations and enterprises.
The lack of limits made them subservient to President Benigno S. Aquino 3rd’s determination to make the legislature his rubber stamp.
yenmakabenta@yahoo.com
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