Functional government

“I think what we have managed to do in the first 100 days is put together a government that is functional and which has a very, very good idea of what we are targeting in terms of strict economic targets for example…”

That’s how Junior answered the question about his first hundred days during the President’s Night organized by the Manila Overseas Press Club last week. Junior also said he was kept busy “putting out fires”, citing problems in the agriculture sector such as sugar and fertilizer supply for rice farmers.

Hmmm… That’s because his predecessor was a mess. When Junior said he focused on having a functional government, he was saying the Duterte-led government was less than that. And Junior would be right.

Choosing the right people in his Cabinet is, indeed, the first step. Credit Junior for doing that from the first day in office.

Duterte tried to run the country from the perspective of a provincial mayor because he couldn’t get Davao out of his mindset. Duterte didn’t even know enough qualified people who could help him, so he appointed a battalion of old cronies from Davao and a bunch of retired military men. Imagine the entire Comelec was at one time, a Davao dominated commission.

At least with Junior, he took the effort to invite noted experts in various fields. He seemed open to appointing even people from the opposition, but the electoral wounds were too fresh for that to happen this year.

But Junior made the mistake of taking on the agriculture portfolio himself. That’s the most problematic of the departments with a food crisis looming and few immediate solutions available to make a difference.

For agriculture, Junior needs a buffer who will take the blows for him the way former senior usec Leo Sebastian did in the sugar blowup. Rice may prove to be a problem soon, with harvests hampered by a typhoon and lack of fertilizers. Surely, Junior doesn’t want to take the blame for this.

The problem with the last agriculture secretary under Duterte is his lack of market savvy. He may know his science, but the agricultural traders were running circles around him. That’s why there was the problem with sugar, onions, garlic and possibly rice.  Farmers were also throwing away their ripe tomatoes on the side of highways.

Junior has no exposure with the agricultural trading cartels and wouldn’t know how to deal with them. The decision on whether we will have reasonably priced rice in the market is made in Divisoria, not at the DA or Malacanang.

The ideal Secretary of Agriculture is one who also speaks and understands the language of the traders. On top of all that, he must understand the politics of it all.

To me, the ideal secretary of agriculture is Art Yap who held the position before he became a congressman and a governor. But he is not available for appointment because he just lost his reelection bid for Bohol governor. Still, Junior should pick his brain and ask him to help strategize a plan.

What impressed me about Art was his no nonsense approach. He had the guts to “educate” his boss, then PGMA, who wanted to do something that he thought wouldn’t work.

Art has long wanted to consolidate farms for greater productivity. He also wanted to set up a logistical network of cold storage and refrigerated trucks to help farmers liberate themselves from the clutches of traders. I guess he didn’t get enough support and he also ran out of time.

The other urgent matter Junior neglected in his first hundred days is getting a health secretary. I cannot understand why he decided to just entrust a key department in this era of a pandemic to an officer-in-charge.

Junior might be under the misimpression that the COVID problem is winding down. That seems to be what everybody is thinking. Even the Catholic bishops want their faithful to attend Sunday Holy Mass in person.

Well… if we had a health secretary, he or she would be closely planning how to deal with this very resilient virus that mutates faster than we can make vaccines to deal with it.

Warnings have been issued about new sub strains of the Omicron variant, specially the XBB strain, described as the scariest of the mutants so far.

XBB is more contagious than any previous variant or subvariant. It also evades the antibodies from monoclonal therapies, potentially rendering a whole category of drugs ineffective as COVID treatments.

The good news is that the new “bivalent” vaccine boosters from Pfizer and Moderna seem to work just fine against XBB, even though the original vaccines are less effective against XBB.

Amesh Adalja, a public-health expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told The Daily Beast: “Even with immune-evasive variants, vaccine protection against what matters most–severe disease–remains intact.”

The bad news is, our government is not even thinking of authorizing the use of this bivalent vaccine that has the Omicron strain incorporated with the original strain. That makes us badly exposed. We are risking a surge that compromises the economy.

The current wave of COVID infections in Singapore is being driven by the XBB sub-variant and a Singapore official said it is likely to peak at an average of 15,000 cases a day by next month.

A Filipino infectious disease expert believes that the Omicron subvariant XBB is probably here by now, given we have several daily flights to and from Singapore. The Philippine Genome Center has to be given more support to test more COVID test samples for sequencing so we know what we have here.

The point simply is, we should have a full-time health secretary who should plan for contingencies. We cannot repeat the ad hoc approach of the past in handling this virus.

Maybe, Junior is taking his time choosing a health secretary because he is determined to appoint the best possible candidate for the job. Get one who is trained and experienced in public health and infectious diseases, and  has the administrative skills to manage our rickety health infrastructure without the help of ex-generals.

As the boy scouts say, be prepared!

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter@boochanco