Poster boy

Joseph Emilio Abaya now leads the pack in the race to be poster boy for the incompetence and insensitivity of the Aquino administration.

Earlier in the week, the DOTC secretary allowed an unguarded remark and reaped the whirlwind. Many days after, social media is still seething with angry feedback from outraged citizens.

Abaya remarked the traffic situation was not “fatal.” He was clearly out of touch with the plight of our commuters. Day in and day out, those who need to commute to work suffer cruel and unusual punishment. With the MRT virtually crumbling, commuters crowd the buses. Traffic hardly moves nearly all hours of the day.

Five years in charge of our country, this administration has not delivered the vital infrastructure so direly needed to move forward. Nowhere is the failure more pronounced than in the provision of efficient mass transit in the metropolis.

In the end, the poor pays for the infra backlog. They leave for work before daybreak and return deep into the night – mainly because public transport is grossly deficient. They get to work tired and return home dead tired. Government failure robs all of us our quality of life.

Observe those who have no choice but to use the decrepit commuter rail system. They go through the chore much like zombies, enduring the long lines, absent escalators and rundown stations. There is no cheerful face in the trains, only disdain for those whose job it is to deliver efficient service to our citizens.

Abaya’s crude attempt to downplay what all commuters need to endure because his agency is incompetent and his men corrupt backfired immediately. It smacked of such cavalier attitude towards the suffering commuters. It captures the state of denial of this administration, its propensity to evade blame for its obvious failures.

Abaya is insult added to injury, callousness added to incompetence.

The President, whose standards are abysmal, praises Abaya often for nothing in particular. Everybody else long wanted him to resign for specifically cited instances of incompetence.

Sadly, Abaya’s President values loyalty more than competence. Because of that, we are all doomed to suffer Abaya and his ilk for ten more months before a new administration might bring in some talent into our governance.

Aquino brought in mostly mediocrities, recruited from a small circle of friends, cronies and classmates. The calamity that brought is masked by repeated propaganda grabbing credit for the outcomes of work put in by previous administrations.

There will be time, hopefully soon, for a proper accounting of the dimensions of this calamity: the bad decisions made, the treacherous contracts forged, the bribery of entire institutions, the demoralization caused the bureaucracy. All the gruesome stories, now passed around in whispers, will finally land the front pages – such as the extent to which a Cabinet member’s low-level lover took control of an agency’s procurement and interfered in the promotions process.

A few years ago, our officials raised an outcry over some foreign novelist who described Metro Manila as the “Gates of Hell.” Those same officials then made, largely through inaction, life even more hellish for the doomed denizens of this condemned metropolis.

The polling companies who track our people’s opinions have not been asking the right questions that will lay bare the extent of public demoralization that has happened.

They keep asking useless questions like: “Are you optimistic about the next year?” Predictably, optimists will outnumber pessimists – or else, suicides become an epidemic.

They should ask questions like: “Is your quality of life better today than it was five years ago?” Those who ride the commuter trains, wade through flash floods at the slightest rain, suffer the trauma of home invasions and other crimes against property and sit through infernal traffic jams will give an interesting picture of our people’s plight.

Statisticians who regularly measure the increase or decrease in the poverty rates based on the unrealistic metric of P52 per day in disposable income should end this pointless exercise. Anyone who has P53 per day in disposable income is not less poor.

Instead, our statisticians might try and be a little creative in drawing a picture of what our society has become. They could assemble indicators that will measure the plight of our middle class and how this segment is driven to extinction by high tax rates, high transport costs, high power rates, oligopolistic pricing like forcing consumers to pay the most for the slowest internet services.

Our statisticians might try to construct a model that compares proportions of commuting time to actual productive time, the comparative percentage of holidays to working days, comparative measures for state economic investments across the regions. We might have a better sociological picture of how our society has become and how our economy might fare in a more competitive future.

But let us not stray too far beyond the man of the hour: Joseph Emilio Abaya, poster boy for insensitivity and incompetence.

What grand accomplishment might we attribute to this cavalier?

He was supposed to have delivered the LRT-1 extension to Bacoor by this year. He failed in that.

He is in charge of the MRT-3. That is a disaster area.

He was tasked with upgrading our airports. All red marks there.

His agency oversees interisland port modernization. Interisland ferries are a hazard to our health.

The French-assisted program to modernize our smaller ports was shelved by his predecessor Mar Roxas. Abaye kept it there.

Abaya appointed cronies to the LRTA and the PNR. Those utilities are now a mess.

The poster boy he truly is.