With further amendments, new PSC law is welcome

I obtained a copy of House Bill (HB) 6090, entitled “An Act Amending Republic Act No. 6847, otherwise known as the “The Philippine Sports Commission Act,” introduced by Cong. Cesar Jalosjos, chairman of the House Committee on Youth and Sports.

The bill has many good points. It also has some features that I strongly disagree with.

Overall, the bill finally recognizes the multi-disciplinary and multi-sector approach to sports development. It also acknowledges the sequential nature of sports development, starting from community sports that are the responsibility of local government units, and going all the way up to elite or high level sports. The bill also attempts to make full use of the existing framework for sports development established during the administrations of Presidents Corazon C. Aquino and Fidel V. Ramos, a framework totally ignored by previous Philippine Sports Commission (PSC) leaderships either out of sheer ignorance of how a framework operates or for political reasons, i.e., a great number of the executive orders and instructions that comprise the framework were prepared by earlier administrations.

The bill finally acknowledges the need for a Master Plan for physical fitness and amateur sports development. It would have however been probably more practical, in this day of open competitions (“amateurs” and professionals playing against each other), just to have stated, “sports development,” without limiting the plan to “amateur” sports development.

The bill could have then stated that the development of non-amateur/professional sports is primarily the job of the private sector (with the proper government agency providing the regulatory framework and the impetus for providing inputs from professional sports for the Master Plan) and the professional sports component, will be an adjunct of the Master Plan.

It must be noted that professional sports or sports for entertainment is at the apex of the sports development pyramid which starts at the grassroots. The preparation of a formal Master Plan for Sports Development done with the necessary rigor and consultation with sports stakeholders should be the first major task of any reconstituted PSC. This Master Plan is akin to sector plans prepared, say by the Departments of Agriculture, Agrarian Reform and Environment and Natural Resources, for the rural and agriculture sectors and by the Department of Energy for power and energy.

With a Master Plan that is apolitical and formulated by PSC and the civil servants within its ranks and other sports stakeholders together with the National Economic and Development Authority, there will be little need for succeeding administrations to reinvent the wheel and start from scratch. It is expected that civil servants within PSC that will provide the continuity and institutional memory thus obviating the need for fixed terms for the PSC chairman and commissioners. The bill proposes a fixed term of four years for the chairman and the first two commissioners and two years for the other two commissioners. Some have said that “four years for a good chairman is too short and four years for a bad chairman is too long.”

I guess that the same thing goes for the commissioners. I would therefore not go along the amendment to provide a fixed term for the chairman and commissioners. In fact, I suggest that the commissioners be reduced to two so that PSC will have a compact three-person PSC Board. I would suggest further that the chairman be given the privilege of appointing the two commissioners (who therefore need not be given the rank of Assistant Secretary) in the same way that the chairman appoints the PSC executive director (who, by the way, should be a civil servant and not a commissioner, who is a political appointee). In addition, the commissioners should not be given any line responsibility except for some ad hoc functions limited by time and purpose (for example task forces to formulate a special program) to avoid conflicts of interest, for the sake of good governance.

The commissioners should devote their time at the PSC to direction-setting and policy-making and not duplicate the work of the executive director and the rest of the bureaucracy. Vesting members of the board (which is what commissioners are) with line functions just serves to confuse the bureaucracy, creates redundancies and could even undermine the authority of the executive director.

The executive director should lead the rest of the civil service bureaucracy that will provide continuing service regardless of who is President of the Philippines, chairman of the PSC, etc. He/she should be empowered together with the rest of rank-and-file civil servants and provided with training in various aspects of management and administration and sports.

 Next week, more comments on HB 6090.