By KIM ARVEEN M. PATRIA
AT first, politicians attend to needs. After some time, the needs turn to wants and desires. Soon the desire becomes greed. Then, to satisfy greed, they push the country to the brink of poverty.
Communications expert Cesar Mercado calls this the “stairway to poverty,” a phenomenon seen at work in developing countries and even in international development organizations.
Mercado, founder of the research and consultancy organization Development Council for Asia Africa Pacific (DCAAP), analyzed poverty using a behavioral perspective in his book Reinventing Social Technologies for Developing Countries launched recently.
He said many poverty programs in the Philippines fail due to “status syndrome,” a term he used to refer to the Filipinos’ penchant for overemphasizing the importance of prestige or status in society.
“All forms of yabang (arrogance) are symptoms (of the status syndrome),” said Mercado, a former planning, monitoring and evaluation specialist of the United Nations Development Program.
He cited as an example the use of wang-wang, the term popularized by President Benigno Aquino III in lambasting politicians’ overuse of sirens and escorts to evade traffic rules.
He said other manifestations of this tendency are the purchase of expensive yet unnecessary equipment and technologies, as well as colonial mentality or the preference for imported products.
Quoting anthropologist Ralph Linton, Mercado said prestige is stronger than money in the Philippines and in other societies as well.
He said there is so much wastage of resources since 90 percent of funds allotted for the poor dissipate through the bureaucracy.
Economic factors, he said, are insufficient to explain poverty in the Philippines and in the world. He explained that although governments have implemented key projects against poverty in the past 15 years, more countries are becoming poorer.
“It seems that the higher the budget we devote to poverty, the more people are impoverished,” he said.
Mercado observed that “status syndrome” also affects the performance of government officials. Based on feedback from over 1,500 employees of government and private institutions, he found that many ideas and programs generated at the grassroots level remain unimplemented due to lack of cooperation from higher-ups.
“Participatory? That is only good in paper,” Mercado said. “In reality, they don’t practice that. They don’t listen to their subordinates.”
Because of this, most of the projects pursued by government and other institutions and “even budgeting” are based on trial-and-error, explained Mercado.
He mentioned the case of the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System salary scandal to illustrate how excessive budget for some projects and budget deficit for other items could eventually give rise to graft and corruption.
Mercado also noted that Filipinos are good at conceptualizing programs and projects but fall short in implementation and evaluation.
“Puro tayo yabang, pa-impress (For us it’s always about pride and making a good impression),” he said.
On the Filipinos’ fondness for programs patterned after that of highly developed countries, Mercado said, “Sometimes we are really over-ambitious. We are not yet ready for them.”
He agreed with a student’s observation made at an open forum during his book launch that the performance evaluation system in government is usually personality-based which, he said, is another problem rooted in Filipino tradition.
Mercado said that evaluation must be based on output, not on relationships and pakikisama (the Filipino trait of making compromises for the sake of maintaining relationships).
To solve problems in the bureaucracy like the “status syndrome,” Mercado proposed the reinvention of social technologies to apply to developing countries. In his book, Mercado defined social technologies as strategies, methods and tools developed to improve efficiency of organizations.
“While scientific technologies follow natural laws, social technologies are actually governed by cultural laws,” Mercado said.
For instance, he explained that an organizational framework in the United States may not work as effectively in the Philippines.
Mercado’s nonprofit organization DCAAP has developed several social technologies applicable to the Philippines, including a log map that records an organization’s inputs and activities for a certain project, as well as its outputs, effects, outcome and impact. It has also come up with implementation, monitoring and evaluation tools.
“Some of the benefits of using these social technologies are the optimization of resources and more effective organizations that achieve their goals,” Mercado said.
He said the DCAAP-devised technologies are being used by the University of Mindanao, UP Diliman Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Development, the provincial governments of La Union and Bulacan, and UNICEF Sudan. The Department of Social Welfare and Development is set to follow suit.
Mercado said the government should strive for a strategic plan to make long-term development possible in the country, stretching to a minimum of 10 or 15 years. He said such a mechanism will ensure continuity of projects despite changes in administration.