When one utters the phrase bahala na before taking any action, the speaker can be said to be either naïve or careless. Bahala na generally connotes something negative, as the doer leaves the success of his action to chance, to fate or to something he fails to take into account. However, author and University of the Philippines professor F. Landa Jocano says bahala na can be a powerful enabler, as it allows people to move forward despite manifest difficulty or seeming impossibility.
Civil Service Institute (CSI) Director Arturo “Turok” Florentin aims to share a Public Service Values Program (PSVP) at the highest level of the government bureaucracy to help inculcate the values of Patriotism, Integrity, Excellence, Spirituality (PIES) in all public servants. Some advocates of the doctrine of separation of Church and State may consider the idea of sharing the value of spirituality to government leaders as violative of the Constitution. But while the PSVP will definitely make reference to some biblical passages, it is never about any religion. According to Turok, the PSVP is about the spirituality within us, which ought to strengthen our shared values as Filipinos. As some volunteers were brainstorming as to the final content of the PSVP curriculum, someone said the speakers and facilitators should minimize mentioning the word God, as the audience might think that the seminar is about religion. The lawyer in the group, however, pointed out that no less than the Constitution, the supreme law of the land, implores the aid of Almighty God, “in order to build a just and humane society”. Further, as recited in all government agencies during their respective flag- raising ceremonies, the Oath to the Flag (Panunumpa sa Watawat) makes reference to a Philippine society that is makadiyos, makatao, makakalikasan at makabansa.
Making reference to a “God” in our Constitution, in the Oath to the Flag, and in the recently approved Oath of Public Servants is a clear declaration of our nation’s trust in a good, loving and all-powerful God. However, our systemic and institutionalized corruption illustrates this disconnect between the faith of some of our public servants and their dismal and sometimes “unholy” performance in public office. Hence, the PIES seminar, as part of the PSVP, will hopefully jump-start the process of resolving this disconnect that has prevented the sustainable development of our country in recent years. Based on Transparency International records, the Philippines has remained at the bottom half of 176 countries being ranked, averaging at 115th (Least Corrupt) from 2007 to 2016. Denmark consistently occupied the top spot, with Somalia at the bottom. In 2016 the Philippines (101st) trailed Sri Langka by six points (95th), while surpassing Palestine (107th) by six points.
Of the four values in PIES, the one that struck me the most is spirituality. To attest to the success of a spirituality-based leadership in government, Turok presented the case study of Parañaque City. Without mentioning specific names, Turok said the transformation of that city started with a simple Bible study sponsored by a certain pastor from Christ Commission Fellowship as approved by the city mayor. The pastor supposedly even hosted the meals of the participants in the Bible study. As narrated by Turok, bringing the workers in City Hall closer to God miraculously got rid of the ipis in the city. Ipis, or cockroach in the vernacular, stands for Inggit, Poot, Intriga, Selos (Greed, Hate, Intrigue, Jealousy) as per Director Florentin. As soon as the ipis in Parañaque City was exterminated, revenues dramatically improved in terms of tax collection (from P900 million to P3.2 billion), and the morale of the workers exponentially soared.
The transformation story in Parañaque City in 2010 is similar to the makeover story in New York City in 1990 as narrated in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Tipping Point. Gladwell theorized that certain individuals who simply exerted the effort to clean and fix the broken glass windows in several buildings in the city contributed greatly to the reduction in the crime rate in New York City. In his Law of the Few, similar to the Pareto principle, Gladwell states that roughly 80 percent of the work will be done by only 20 percent of the organization. This is what, I think, happened in Parañaque. The agents of change were a handful of people in City Hall who tried to know God through regular Bible study classes. “God in City Hall” led to a Parañaque phenomenon where both city workers and residents somehow became holier, as in more law-abiding and more tax-compliant, to the extent that the city official seal now has a caption that says “Dedicated to God”.
Meaningful change is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a rare set of social gifts. Florentin is one of these people who will soon embark on this audacious journey of spreading the Patriotism Integrity Excellence Spirituality virus to government leaders. Instead of being hesitant, Florentin remains confident that this PIES virus will eventually lead to a social epidemic to the point of making the country’s leaders less corrupt and more holy. CSI Director Arturo Florentin, whose nickname Turok means “inject” in English, has injected the letter “T” in bahala na. Having that letter T, which I surmise stands for “Trust” and not for “Turok”, all in government ought to proclaim, not bahala na, but Bathala na—whose vernacular translation means God.