A fishy story

DENR Secretary Bebet Gozun has run into her first political firestorm. Luckily for her, it really wasn’t a big conflagration – more like a brushfire or a kainginero’s first burn. But it illustrates how public cynicism, entitlement politics, and a general disregard for due process can lethally combine to try and bring down even the best-intentioned of civil servants.

Bebet’s tale starts with DAO 17, an internal administrative order issued back in June 2001 by her predecessor Sonny Alvarez. This document formalized the guidelines for delineating "municipal waters" that had been drafted two years earlier by the National Resource Mapping and Information Authority (NAMRIA).

"Municipal waters" are broadly defined under the Philippine Fisheries Code to extend 15 kilometers out from the shoreline. Big bucks are riding on this definition. Only small fisher folk can ply municipal waters and not big companies. Moreover, it is the LGUs that collect the revenues from licenses, permits, and similar fees, not the national government’s Bureau of Fisheries & Aquatic Resources (BFAR).

Naturally, the guidelines issued under DAO 17 ran into objections. BFAR objected. The big fishing companies objected. Various congressional committees objected, including the powerful Committee on Appropriations, which passed a resolution finding "legal defect."

Faced by this righteous onslaught, the executive branch punted DAO 17 over to the Department of Justice for their legal opinion. In October 2001, the department tried to sidestep the issue by refusing to opine on the grounds that it was a "highly technical matter" and not just a question of law.

To no avail, our stalwart congressmen, ever mindful of course of the public good, continued to press the DOJ for further clarification or reconsideration. Finally, in late November 2002, the Justice Department issued its ruling – such as it was – that the authority to issue the guidelines on delineating municipal waters actually lay with the Department of Agriculture, not DENR.

Now one may have his or her own opinion about the wisdom and decisiveness of the DOJ, or about the motivations of our congressmen, or even about the technical quality of the guidelines under DAO 17 (if one’s interests run in geodetic or aquatic direction). But that is neither here nor there when it comes to compliance with a Justice Department ruling.

Under the Administrative Code, such a ruling "shall be conclusive and binding on all parties concerned." This left the new DENR Secretary with no other choice but to revoke DAO 17 last March.

At the same time, however, Secretary Gozun has continued to push the underlying, and broader, public policy objectives on a variety of fronts:

• By asking NAMRIA to go ahead and finalize its report and the maps for shoreline areas it had already delineated;

• By asking her colleague, Agriculture Secretary Cito Lorenzo, to immediately issue the guidelines for offshore areas without islands/islets;

• By jointly constituting with Secretary Lorenzo a multisectoral technical working group to support the continuing work on the guidelines, with representation from academe, the legislature, LGUs, and the fishing industry.

These are activities that she did not have to initiate or continue. Once the DOJ ruling came out, she could just as well have dropped everything, passed the buck to Lorenzo as she was specifically instructed to do, and moved on to other matters that, unlike this one, are indeed part of her responsibility.

But knowing Bebet, I am not surprised at all that she has chosen to try and do far more than what the job, or even simple self-preservation, calls for.

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Thus, what has particularly pained her from this incident are the charges from some fishermen’s associations, as well as something called the Tambuyog Development Foundation, that her decision to revoke DAO 17 constituted a sell-out, the price she had to pay for confirmation to the Cabinet.

These accusations must be especially galling to someone who has spent most of her professional life either advocating or consulting on behalf of the environment, who never sought her current position and would be just as happy departing the fabled snakepit, were it not for what she sees as unique opportunities to do good, render service, make a difference.

Unfortunately, Bebet has not been spared the enmity of those quarters who can’t be bothered with too many inconvenient facts, who consider themselves entitled to permanent preferential treatment and will not hesitate to defame anyone who falls short of their self-righteous expectations.

This kind of noxious thinking is fed by widespread and, all too often, well-founded public cynicism about the morals, intentions, and capabilities of the typical public servant whether elected or appointed. If the available crop of politicians and bureaucrats is regarded as no better than a garden of weeds, what’s to prevent the occasional solitary flower from being trampled on together with the rest?

The problem, unlike in other countries, is that Filipinos here can barely be trusted to behave themselves if left unattended. I remember one traffic-clogged morning, I scolded a bunch of jeepney drivers who were blithely taking on passengers right in front of a sign that clearly said "No Loading or Unloading." Reacting to my remonstrations, the street barker memorably responded, "E, wala namang pulis, a!"

This has got to be the same thought crossing the mind of the executive in his air-conditioned car who runs red lights at night, or the government clerk who stuffs his desk drawers with cash pay-off, or the philandering husband who maintains one or two or three mistresses on the side. Like some sinister mantra, this kind of thinking automatically operates to absolve and exonerate.

As a people, we are still at that stage of maturity where we have to be instructed at every turn, by reminder or by example, what is the right thing to do. And yet the leaders to whom we must turn for such instruction are congenitally mistrusted by us, perhaps because we see, in the mirror that their lives reflect back upon us, too painful a reminder of our own shortcomings.

From few of them, if any, are we willing to accept the civilizing restraints that our own collective conscience still appears to be too undeveloped as yet to bind upon us. And so we cycle ever downward in an unvirtuous circle, accepting no one as worthy enough to command better behavior from us.

What to do, then? How to sift the grain from the chaff, how to separate the worthy from the rest? How to spot the occasional gem buried in the dross, rescue it and polish it and then add it to what – God willing – may become a lengthening string of precious stones that the race can pridefully wear to the global ball?

How do we begin to create better versions of ourselves, in spite of ourselves?

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Readers may write Mr. Olivar at gbolivar1952 @yahoo.com.