Form over content

ONCE at an organic farming seminar I wondered privately to a retired government agriculturist why no extension work was happening in the neighborhood of my farm. His candid answer: Government extension workers are fielded not mainly with instructions to get results but to file the prescribed reports to justify the budget. This, of course, can be done without going to a farm.

A non-government organization (NGO) had the opportunity to participate in a revised cash transfer program that failed when at first politicians did the distributing. After a year, the NGO opted out, frustrated at how the government agency breathed down its neck more for required reports than for actual results.

I don’t know how many others prefer form over content but LTFRB’s (Land Transportation Franchising Regulatory Board) recent failure to resolve the Uber and Grab issue in favor of the riding public is another case of a government agency forgetting what it is there for, hence sacrificing substance for form.

The content of any government agency’s work is the specific service it is tasked to provide its citizen-clients. In LTFRB’s case it is the adequacy, affordability and safety of public transport services.

The form would be the working rules and regulations prescribed so the agency can render the service efficiently and effectively. In LTFRB’s case that would primarily be the franchising and registration formalities of networks and vehicles and their corresponding fees or fines as the case may be.

Because of its preoccupation with form, LFTRB miserably fails to see Uber and Grab as solutions to the riding public’s problem of rude, domineering and even criminally-bent taxi drivers. If, as should be, LTFRB had the interests of the riding public at the top of its priorities, it should have gone out on a limb to facilitate (make easy and hassle free?) the franchising and registration of Uber and Grab units instead of simply imposing fines for the former’s violation of agency rules and regulations.

The riding public has found a solution to its problem with taxis in the highly professional service of Uber and Grab drivers. But blindsided by bureaucratic preoccupation with form, LTFRB sees Uber and Grab only as an additional regulatory problem and not as the public’s welcome solution to choosy and fare-haggling taxi drivers.

In preferring form over content, LTFRB is listening more to the clamor of taxi drivers for regulatory fairness than to the public’s clamor for the safe and straightforward service of Uber and Grab. Instead of owning up to their failure to regulate taxis, it takes the easy regulatory way out and in the process leaves the riding public at the continued mercy of unruly taxi drivers.

— Orlando P. Carvajal