Post-election appointments of Arroyo for politics, not policy

By Miriam Grace A. Go, Newsbreak The President’s recent appointments do not indicate serious housecleaning or attempts to improve governance Since July, when the election ban on reorganizations in and appointments to the government was lifted, President Arroyo has either placed or transferred 51 persons in 46 agencies, offices, and government corporations and sequestered companies. Despite the numbers involved, the appointments do not seem to be in pursuit of a policy direction or serious housecleaning. (Click here for list of post-election appointees.) Critics say that her post-election exercise, as in all the reorganizations that she has made in the past six years, are meant for her political protection and survival. Specifically, they appear to reward people who deliver during elections, trouble-shoot during crises, or prevent any coup from succeeding. The Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) is a showcase of such principle governing the President’s choices of people to appoint and offices to create or expand. Last week, Malacañang announced that Arturo Lomibao would be the new head of the Land Transportation Office (LTO), a move that many observers interpreted as a form of political accommodation. Lomibao, after all, was the National Police chief at the height of renewed attempts to oust President Arroyo in February 2006, implementing tough street actions against protesters and briefly taking over the opposition newspaper Daily Tribune. Lomibao is a native of vote-rich Pangasinan province and is said to be close to the President’s brother, Diosdado “Buboy" Macapagal Jr., as well as the influential Iglesia ni Cristo. Upon his retirement from the police in June 2006, he was named administrator of the National Irrigation Administration, a job that he quit when he considered running for a congressional seat in Pangasinan last May. But he dropped his electoral plans, so here he is again in the Arroyo government. With Lomibao’s appointment, however, also came the question: What happens to Reynaldo Berroya, another retired police general, then the incumbent at LTO? Isn’t he another loyalist of the President? The President is keeping both. Berroya retains his rank as assistant secretary with the LTO’s mother agency, DOTC. Berroya has figured in nasty demolition campaigns against his nemesis, former National Police chief and now opposition Sen. Panfilo Lacson since 2001. Berroya is likewise closely associated with First Gentleman Mike Arroyo. Berroya’s superior at the DOTC, Secretary Leandro Mendoza, is himself a former national police chief, and is one of the so-called Batangas Boys, a power clique in the administration that is headed by Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita. Mendoza’s predecessor at the department, who held the post until early 2005, was another former National Police chief chief, Hermogenes Ebdane, who is now secretary of the Department of Public Works and Highways (following a short and uneventful stint as defense secretary). Government’s ‘Generalization’ UP public administration professor Leonor Briones says one of her students described this pattern thus: “The government is undergoing a ‘generalization,’" referring to the fact that the President is naming retired police and military generals to several government agencies and government corporations. Political veterans see the President’s move as a way of keeping the generals happy, so that they will protect her in case of another people-power attempt to oust her. Of the post-2007 polls appointees, we identified at least seven with police and military backgrounds. Many of them, however, are not really new but were just rotated from one post to another. Others were accommodated again after their short leave from office. (Click here for list of post-elections appointees with military or police background.) The appointments we have monitored also show that the offices and jobs involved in the latest reorganization are unrelated in terms of sectors or policy areas that they affect, and thus may not accomplish much in following through long-term programs or priority projects. That the number of people added to or moved within Ms. Arroyo’s official family (51) is almost the same as the number of offices affected (46) indicates that she’s touching as many organizations as possible on a token basis. We classified the appointments according to the affected offices and corporations under the following: the Office of the President (OP); departments and their attached agencies; and government-owned and controlled corporations (GOCCs) and companies with sequestered shares (Click here for list of affected offices). Not surprisingly, most of the positions to which the new appointees or “transferees" are named indicate that the appointments are political favors. More than half of the new appointments (24) are in the Office of the President — presidential assistants and advisers or heads of task forces or committees. Examples of these are Antonio “Tonypet" Albano, a member of a political dynasty in Isabela, who’s been named executive director of the Office of Political Coalition Affairs after serving as deputy spokesman of the administration’s Team Unity senatorial slate; and Aladdin Ampatuan, a relative of the Maguindanao governor who delivered a 12-0 vote for Ms. Arroyo’s senatorial bets, who’s been named assistant secretary for Muslim concerns at the Office for External Affairs. Nestor Camacho, reportedly close to First Gentleman Mike Arroyo, has been named Presidential Assistant for Region 12 at the Office of External Affairs. Former San Juan, Southern Leyte, Mayor Virgilio Montera has been appointed transportation assistant secretary. His town is one of those in Southern Leyte that went heavily for Team Unity senatorial bets in the last elections. New Offices Malacañang even announced in a span of two weeks the creation of five offices or temporary bodies: the International Media Office; the Eminent Persons Group for the promotion of Nasugbu, Batangas, tourism; the Presidential Task Force on the Security of Energy Facilities and Enforcement of Energy Laws and Standards; the Revenue Enhancement Task Force; and the Anti-Smuggling Task Force. The tasks of these new offices and bodies clearly duplicate those of established agencies, but they were created anyway, not the least for political accommodation. The Anti-Smuggling Task Force, for instance, was created to be headed by Antonio Villar Jr., the former Pangasinan mayor who gave the late Fernando Poe Jr. a statistically improbable zero vote in the 2004 presidential elections. Poe was the strongest rival of President Arroyo then. The second biggest number of appointments are in departments and attached agencies (20), followed by two in GOCCs and sequestered companies. The departments are not spared from politically-influenced appointments. While Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro Jr. is a reserved military officer, and many observers believe that the department is better off being led by a civilian, there’s no doubt that the primary reason Teodoro was appointed was his political connections. Teodoro is a former three-term congressman of Tarlac, and was the head of the Nationalist People’s Coalition (NPC) in the House of Representatives. In the last elections, NPC, of course, was the political party that got away with being in bed with both the administration and the opposition. Teodoro is also said to be the favorite nephew and political alter ego of NPC founder and businessman Eduardo “Danding" Cojuangco, an acknowledged kingmaker. Other examples are Secretary Angelo Reyes of the Department of Energy (DOE) and Secretary Joselito Atienza of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), both deemed by civil society groups unqualified for their new jobs. Reyes was originally appointed to the Cabinet as secretary of defense, a job right up his alley. He was moved to the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG), however, when he was thought to be considering running for the Senate in 2004; the agency provided a perfect vehicle for grassroots organization. But when the administration’s campaign for constitutional amendments had to go full blast, Reyes had to be removed to give way to Ronaldo Puno at the DILG; Puno has mastered the local terrain. Reyes was then transferred to DENR (to replace Michael Defensor who was running for senator in 2007), only to be plucked out after the elections to give way to retiring Manila mayor Atienza, who had solicited the support of local officials and his fellow Liberals for President Arroyo in past political crises. Reyes was transferred to the DOE, which by coincidence didn’t have a secretary after the resignation of Raphael Lotilla. (read Why Atienza is At DENR here) Reyes’s New Unit Perhaps to appease Reyes, who was reportedly peeved for being thrown around, the President signed Executive Order 655 immediately after Reyes’s transfer to DOE. Signed in late August, the EO creates the Presidential Task Force on the Security of Energy Facilities and Enforcement of Energy Laws and Standards. It’s actually a replacement for Reyes’s National Anti-Environment Crime Task Force when he was at the DENR, with the EO specifying that the environment task force’s personnel and assets will be transferred to the new energy task force. While there have been only a few appointments to GOCCs and sequestered companies, the list is expected to get longer, since the President had asked the officers and board members of these companies to submit their courtesy resignations. It was widely believed that the vacant seats were being reserved for more political allies. This became apparent when the President asked her former chief of staff, Michael Defensor, to take the government seat in the board of the United Coconut Planters Bank right after Defensor lost in the senatorial elections. President Arroyo apparently thought that GOCCs were not covered by the election code’s one-year ban on the appointment of losing candidates. Defensor declined the offer precisely to avoid any controversy or legal questions about the ban. Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita, however, admitted in a press briefing that the President intends to appoint to GOCCs and government agencies the losing candidates of Team Unity after the ban is lifted. GOCC seats may also be offered to appease those who will be transferred from their original offices to give way to other appointees. An example is former Commission on Higher Education chair Carlito Puno, who was removed to give way to Romulo Neri. Puno has been named president of a sequestered company, the United Coconut Chemicals Inc. (read Tit for Tat? here) Neri’s demotion from being director of the National Economic and Development Authority is another story in itself, with various sources citing different instances when he displeased the President’s close political allies. (read Why Neri Was Demoted here, and Romulo Neri: Say No and Tell here) Whatever the reasons, the effect was plucking Neri out of where he was most effective. Thus, he’s now being lined along “people [who] are not fit for their new positions, like Reyes and Atienza," Briones says. Neri was transferred to CHED, she says, apparently “just to shut [him] up." Briones agrees that there seems to be no rhyme nor reason in the appointments recently made by the President, no strategy governance-wise that’s being followed. “But they’re politically strategic," she says. The President is “thinking post-2010" and therefore, this early, is putting in place people “who will protect her and will be loyal to her." That she’s rotating people who have been with her for a long time somehow reinforces that impression. When the President was waiting for the election period to be over before she could name Teodoro to DND, she placed her National Security Adviser and known trouble-shooter, Norberto Gonzales, as acting defense secretary. When presidential political adviser and chief presidential legislative liaison officer Gabriel Claudio resigned to recover from a spinal surgery, Gonzales was again named temporary replacement. (Like Mendoza, Gonzales is known to be close to the President’s brother, Buboy Macapagal) DILG’s Ronaldo Puno, another known crisis manager for the President, has since been named political adviser. Her party mate in Lakas and her conduit to local government officials, Agnes Devanadera, has also been named to several posts, most recently as acting secretary of the Department of Justice (DOJ), while another loyalist, DOJ chief Raul Gonzalez is undergoing treatment for his kidney problems. Devanadera was chief government corporate counsel before she was named Solicitor General, her current post. Minority Leader Rep. Ronaldo Zamora (San Juan) declined to comment on the quality of appointments that the President has been making since after the elections, but he acknowledged that she would understandably put in place people who are loyal to her. “The last thing she wants is to be held accountable for all the wrong things she has done in office." —With research by Lou Janssen Dangzalan, Newsbreak