WHEN asked why it seems that the President often stumbles into the deep mire of diplomatic faux pas, a former Filipino diplomat says it is because the country’s top implementer of foreign policy has “structural problems.”
“Thank you for asking, so I can say it openly,” retired Ambassador Alberto A. Encomienda, the country’s former envoy to Greece, Malaysia and Singapore, said in an interview.
“The problem in the DFA [Department of Foreign Affairs] is structural and, please, believe me, I was in
the DFA for 40 years doing my job very seriously.”
Asked what he meant by “structural,” he said: “When I joined the DFA in the late-1960s…early-1970s, we had topnotch diplomats” Undersecretary Jose D. Ingles, Leon Maria Guerrero, Narciso Ramos, Blas F. Ople, Manuel Pelaez and many more. They’re not around anymore.
“There were people next in line, but the whole thing has been muddled by how we defined the role of
the DFA.”
Explaining further, Encomienda said; “Let me cite one thing, we have a Foreign Service Institute [FSI], perhaps, we should start there. But you look at the curriculum at the FSI, it does not give you confidence that it will be churning out trained diplomats.”
“No. 2, too much emphasis on the passport aspect and the so-called protection of nationals. That is not the job of the DFA; the foreign ministry is basically a think tank.”
To explain how much the DFA had fallen into disrepute and anonymity, Encomienda gave an example, where people who have serious business to discuss would ask the taxi driver: “Take me to the Department of Foreign Affairs.”
And the driver would remark; “Ah, iyong sa Macapagal Avenue!”
“Hindi, iyong sa Roxas Boulevard!” the rider would correct the driver.
“Hindi nila maintindihan kung nasaan sa Roxas Boulevard ang [They could not understand where on Roxas Boulevard the] Department of Foreign Affairs. Even the outlook of the people has changed, thinking the DFA is just for passports,” Encomienda rues.
The soft-spoken diplomat retired in 2008, after spending 10 years on the country’s maritime concerns as an Archipelagic State. He headed the then-Maritime and Ocean Affairs Center (MOAC) in the DFA until 2008.
Wanting to leave a legacy to his children about his life in the Diplomatic Service, Encomienda said he wrote a 75-page monograph. He said he showed the finished product to his colleagues and found it to their liking, so much he was encouraged to expand it.
The result is a 240-page book, The South China Sea Issues and Related Core Interests of the Philippines.
“But it is so boring you have to include cartoons,” he was told, so that the book that came out of the printing press—less than a hundred copies because he had to shoulder all expenses—contains the biting sarcasm of our foreign and local top editorial cartoons to make a lively companion to his oeuvre.
“I’m not a writer,” he confesses, “I am a diplomat and I thought that my monograph would be for my immediate family’s consumption. He said he had been looking for an editor to make his book readable to the general public. This was brought about by the sudden popularity of his book, coming out shortly during the South China Sea dispute with China and the favorable ruling for the Philippines by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, the Netherlands.
According to Encomienda, there was an ongoing, hotly debated internal issue when he was still in the DFA, and that was, who should handle the passport office.
“Normally, the Department of Foreign Affairs is a think tank. If you check with other countries—although I have not done extensive research—but I know for a fact that in the Netherlands passports are issued by the police department. The sense is that the passports should be by the agencies that have the strongest and direct contact with the citizens.”
What Encomienda said appears true because in the Philippines, passport applicants must produce, among others, a clearance from the National Bureau of Investigation, a birth certificate from the National Statistics Office (NSO), a clearance from the barangay where he lives, and if married, another certificate, etc.
“Right now, I would say it should be with the DILG [Department of the Interior and Local Government].”
The former envoy said the issuance of passport and protection of nationals “is giving a lot of distraction to the more important work of the DFA as a think tank on foreign policy.”
In his time at the DFA, he said they wanted the passport office to be issued by the Department of Justice (DOJ), because there was no DILG at that time. But the idea did not prosper and the passport issuance and the income derived from it by means of fees “go directly to the DFA for it to spend for itself.”
“Today that money goes, not to the DFA anymore but to the national government and we are given a budget. Noong una, it was a good idea, it should have been a way to go because a lot of senior DFA officials said we needed a lot of money, so that idea [giving the passport office to the DOJ] died.”
“Now we have no control of the passport money,” he added.
“Can the DFA be streamlined so it can play its role as a think tank?” Encomienda said the passport issue is only one issue, saying, today DFA personnel are concerned mostly with (1) promotions, (2) assignments and (3) allowances.
He added that from the beginning, the DFA is not attracting the best minds but added that there are many distractions today, aside from what he mentioned, for a career official to excel. He refused to elaborate.
Today, Encomienda said the furor engulfing the DFA are the rumored appointments of individuals who are not “career people,” or those from the rank.
“I have no objection about appointments outside of the career, because in the first place, ideal ba ang career service ngayon, no?”
“Going back to what I said, it’s really a distraction, this passport function, it’s all over the country.”
The BusinessMirror checked with recruitment consultant Manny Geslani and said that, from a Senate hearing a week ago, where Foreign Secretary Perfecto R. Yasay Jr. was present, the legislators gathered that the DFA earns about P225 million a year from 300,000 passport applicants or those who renewed their documents.
That is an average of 15 thousands applicants per day, processed at 22 DFA consular offices across
the country.
Encomienda read about the hundreds of Indonesian pilgrim to Mecca, caught red handed last month at the premier airport, while in possession of genuine Filipino passports. Some of them were repatriated to Indonesia.
He said this availability of genuine passport falling into the hands of foreigners is not the only anomaly at the DFA.
Other anomalies include the printing and awarding of contracts to companies that manufacture passport booklets.
1 comment
The problem is Du30, being diagnosed with Antisocial Narcissistic Personality Disorder, who shoots from the hips and does not consult with Secretaries. Often times he is wrong and the following day he has to back track on everything he said from the day before.