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Column: Moving Forward

Karmic Cycle, safety and disasters (2)
By Albert Banico


Today, various fora, meetings and gatherings that deal with our national problems are happening everywhere.

Consequently, governance leads to corrupt and incompetent behavioral pattern instead of building showcases of best practices because standing procedures are not clear and institutions compete with each other instead working of together. Hearing and learning some of them, it seems that these issues cannot be resolved within a single generation. Perhaps they are consequences of decisions that were made in the past. Planning efforts that are short sighted data that are insufficient and solutions that are not applicable are primary problems of people who continue to uphold the levels of thinking that never work.

Environmental and other natural disasters such as constant sinking of ships, vehicular accidents, landslides, and floods are very risky situations. However, if we continue to allow drunkards, illiterates, addicts or emotionally disturbed drivers in the streets and even construct more foot bridges that are never studied why people don’t like it, you can expect that accidents will always happen.

If we continue to allow vessels that are only fit for rivers and not for an open seas or tolerate sub-standard ships and planes as we relax the business environment for those who own the capital while we are too regressive for those who pay, let us expected more misfortunes. Permitting to construct villages and subdivisions either near or close to the river banks; reclaiming rivers and waterways for commercial use; building homes along the landslide prone areas, water sources and health hazard locations, will only just lead to future counting of casualties.

With all of this, as government units and agencies consistently consent without appropriate planning, frameworks, directions and rehabilitation strategies; always failing to anticipate insufficient funds for basic services. Public money is wasted to an endless cycle of search, rescue and rehabilitation purposes.

The local government code aims to empower the communities. It was not intended to decentralize the incompetence and corruption. In the context of various threats to our life support systems, biodiversity, coastal areas, coral reefs, mountains and forests, government people are supposedly not ordinary employees. It seems that not all public servants, even if equipped by their eligibility or academic degrees do not have the creative initiative or a deeper understanding of public service. Some choose to be imprisoned to the task given to them while some who think to earn more money at the expense of others. Some explore creatively the ways and means for their own benefit while laws do not prohibit them to do so.

It means that corruption is not always circumstantial while incompetence sometimes can be unintentional. Both can be considered as a behavioral causing disaster that can be addressed not only by judicial means but by cultural and institutional solutions

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Mr. Banico is one of the Founding Board Members and Advocacy Directors of GREEN RESEARCH Environmental Research Group. He is also a founding board member of the Asian Research Center on Climate Change.