This is a one-part story on how President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has railroaded the selection of the president of the Development Academy of the Philippines (DAP). Tomorrow night, the board of trustees of the DAP is scheduled to interview eight contenders for DAP president. But only one of the shortlisted candidates will show up, with the rest snubbing the meeting because, they said, the results of tonight’s board deliberation are “a foregone conclusion.”
The only one who will come for the interview is the candidate personally chosen by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo: Antonio Kalaw, currently DAP senior vice president and corporate secretary. In an unusual show of defiance and protest, all the rest will boycott the event.
“We cannot allow ourselves to be naïve sacrificial lambs on the altar of ‘presidential desire,’” four of the candidates said in a strongly worded letter rebuking Arroyo for interfering in the selection of the DAP head.
They expect that Kalaw will be named president because this is what President Arroyo wants, and she told the DAP board so in a March 31 letter.
This, despite the fact that Kalaw does not have a postgraduate degree and the rest have PhDs and publications to their name. In terms of qualifications, Kalaw landed seventh among the eight contenders in a ranking made by the DAP search committee.
Arroyo’s interest in the DAP presidency, academy insiders say, may have to with her desire to get a “friendly” president who will vote to oust Civil Service Commission chief Karina David from the chairmanship of the Career Executive Service Board (CESB), which had earlier rebuked Malacañang for ignoring civil-service rules and in effect politicizing the bureaucracy.
The DAP is an independent government think tank and training center. While it is under the Office of the President, the academy has had a tradition of independence from Malacañang since its establishment by President Ferdinand Marcos in 1973. DAP oldtimers say that never in the academy’s history has a president so directly and so obviously intervened in the selection of who would be at the DAP’s helm. While previous heads of state made their preferences known, they did not, like Arroyo, do this even before the search process began.
TONIGHT (May 19) the board of trustees of the Development Academy of the Philippines (DAP) is scheduled to interview eight contenders for DAP president. But only one of the shortlisted candidates will show up, with the rest snubbing the meeting because, they said, the results of tonight’s board deliberation are “a foregone conclusion.”
The only one who will come for the interview is the candidate personally chosen by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo: Antonio Kalaw, currently DAP senior vice president and corporate secretary. In an unusual show of defiance and protest, all the rest will boycott the event.
“We cannot allow ourselves to be naïve sacrificial lambs on the altar of ‘presidential desire,'” four of the candidates said in a strongly worded letter rebuking Arroyo for interfering in the selection of the DAP head.
The DAP is mandated by law to be an independent government think tank and training center. But in an unprecedented move, President Arroyo wrote to the DAP board on March 31, saying “it is my desire that Mr. Antonio D. Kalaw Jr. be elected president, Development Academy of the Philippines, vice Eduardo T. Gonzales effective 31 May 2006.”
While it is under the Office of the President, the academy has had a tradition of independence from Malacañang since its establishment by President Ferdinand Marcos in 1973. DAP oldtimers say that never in the academy’s history has a president so directly and so obviously intervened in the selection of who would be at the DAP’s helm. While previous heads of state made their preferences known, they did not, like Arroyo, do this even before the search process began.
Arroyo’s interest in the DAP presidency, academy insiders say, may have to with her desire to get a “friendly” president who will vote to oust Civil Service Commission chief Karina David from the chairmanship of the Career Executive Service Board (CESB), which had earlier rebuked Malacañang for ignoring civil-service rules and in effect politicizing the bureaucracy.
The CESB oversees the Career Executive Service that comprises the top tiers of the country’s bureaucracy. The DAP president is an ex-oficio member of the CESB and the Foreign Service Institute.
Politicizing DAP
Such politicization now appears to extend to the DAP, once home of apolitical technocrats. In a joint May 11 letter to the DAP board, four candidates for the academy’s presidency accused DAP chair Jimmy Yaokasin of “actively” soliciting from the DAP trustees votes for Kalaw “on behalf of the President and under direct orders from (Executive) Secretary (Eduardo) Ermita.”
Yaokasin, the letter said, “has received statements of votes for the said candidate, in advance of the Board meeting to elect the DAP president.”
The problem is that Kalaw is not the most qualified among the contenders. He does not have a postgraduate degree while all the other candidates are PhD holders with strong local and international connections and a string of publications, researches and awards.
Kalaw also ranked seventh among the eight candidates in the evaluation of the search committee designated by the DAP board only last March 31 after it accepted Gonzales’ retirement and was told about the desire letter. Kalaw would likely have landed at the bottom of the list had the bottom-ranking candidate presented the required paperwork.
For this reason, the four candidates said in their letter, “It is not clear what legitimate purpose the interviews with other candidates like us would serve. We certainly would not want to be mere props for going through the ‘motion of a process pursuant to the requirements of the Civil Service Commission’ as the Chair puts it in his vote solicitation letters to the members of the board.”
The letter was sent by some of the best qualified candidates for the DAP presidency. These are Grace Jamon, dean of the DAP Graduate School; Segundo Romero, former DAP executive vice president; Francisco Magno, executive director the De la Salle University’s Institute of Governance, and Amado Mendoza Jr., an economics professor at the University of the Philippines.
A fifth candidate , UP sociology professor Josefina Navarro, has withdrawn her candidacy, stating in her May 15 letter to the board that “having learned from various sources the circumstances surrounding the search process, I have decided not to participate further in the exercise.”
The sixth candidate, Ayala Corp. associate director and Cebu Business Club president Antonio Pineda, topped the search committee’s list. But he said yesterday he is not going to the interview and will send a regrets letter today.
Also yesterday, the only remaining contender, former environment undersecretary and newly appointed CESB board member Rolando Metin, decided he will also boycott tonight’s event. “At the back of my mind,” he says, “I know somebody has chosen the DAP president.” He was obviously referring to Arroyo.
Undermining independence
Created by presidential decree, the DAP was designed to be an independent institution that enjoys academic freedom to make it an effective think tank, according to Romero, who first joined the academy in 1975.
“Marcos wanted redundancy: He had different institutions doing the same things but producing different results or perspectives that he used as policy inputs,” he says.
The independence of the DAP, which is classified as a government corporation, is ensured partly through provisions in the law that its presidency is a career, not a political position, and its president is elected by the board of trustees, not appointed by the president of the republic.
Romero says the academy’s independence had been respected by previous presidents and is among the reasons it has attracted young, bright and idealistic people, including activist Horacio Morales who was DAP executive vice president when he went underground in the late 1970s. Past DAP presidents included formidable academics and technocrats like Onofre Corpuz, Jaime Laya, Lourdes Quisumbing and Jose de Jesus.
When Gonzales announced on Jan. 23 his intention to retire from the DAP presidency which he had held since 1998, the DAP general assembly created a seven-member search committee composed of officers and employees to come up with nominees.
Kalaw was overseer of the search process. It thus shocked and disappointed his colleagues when he clinched Arroyo’s backing, triggering accusations that “he had allowed a separate, political process in his favor to go on while professing to support the search process.”
Kalaw was told about the president’s desire letter when he and Yaokasin met with Deputy Executive Secretary Jake Lagonera at Malacañang on March 30, a day before the board meeting. Two days earlier, Kalaw had met with Ermita.
Signature campaign
Minutes of the DAP management committee’s emergency meeting on April 3, four days after Arroyo’s “desire” was conveyed to the board, show Gonzales expressing his disappointment with Kalaw for ending up a candidate despite being entrusted with the replacement process.
Gonzales also told the meeting that non-DAP nominees are welcome but external interventions, including obtaining a desire letter from President Arroyo, aren’t.
It was disclosed in the meeting that Kalaw followers had initiated a signature campaign for his candidacy and lobbied for former First Lady Amelita Ramos’s support as well. Kalaw worked closely with Mrs. Ramos when he was resident manager and later director of the DAP Conference Center in Tagaytay.
According to the minutes, Kalaw declared he would write a letter to Ermita to ask Arroyo to withdraw her endorsement.
But Kalaw says in a phone interview he never promised such a thing. He says he was instructed to just verbally relay to the Palace, through Ermita, the academy’s request that it respect the selection process.
He also denies lobbying for his candidacy, saying his followers did so without his consent and knowledge. He says he later withdrew from the search process upon learning he was among the 33 finalists nominated to the search committee. The list was later pruned to 14, with Kalaw in the bottom half.
Kalaw says he never sought Malacañang’s endorsement, but at the same time adds, “Every government corporation has that (presidential interference). The DAP is directly under the Office of the President. Don’t you think the President deserves to pick whom she wants?”
Kalaw also discloses that Gonzales also got then President Estrada to back his candidacy.
Erap’s choice
DAP officials confirm this, saying Gonzales had lobbied for the post through Boy Morales, then Estrada’s agrarian reform secretary. But then, Gonzales was not part of the selection process like Kalaw.
An ex-Estrada Cabinet member says Estrada wrote a desire letter in favor of Gonzales, but this was done three weeks after the board had already elected Gonzales. By then, there was no need to even transmit the letter to the board.
In the March 31 board meeting, the search committee presented the list of 14 nominees they had chosen based on eight criteria: ability to generate resources, visionary leadership, recognized technical expertise, personal integrity, good executive skills, malasakit (commitment), bilib sa DAP (belief in DAP) and personal attributes
According to the minutes of the meeting, Yaokasin was to later tell the trustees in an executive session, during which he read Arroyo’s desire letter, that he still let the search committee present the results because the members had been doing their work for a month, and he did not want them to feel demoralized.
He also suggested that if the board decided to follow the President’s wish, a resolution would be routed to collect the signature of the Cabinet members to confirm Kalaw’s appointment as DAP president.
The DAP board consists of a representative of the Office of the President (Yaokasin in this case), the CSC chair, the DAP president, the secretaries of finance, education, budget and management, agriculture, environment and natural resources, health, and land reform, and the director general of National Economic and Development Authority. The Cabinet members often sent their undersecretaries or assistant secretaries to meetings.
During the meeting, David stressed that her constitutional duty as CSC chair was to object to any selection process that would appoint a person to a Career Executive Service position based only on the desire of the President.
She said when the law empowers a board to appoint the head of an agency, “it means that the accountability of the person being appointed is to the institution. Hence it is incumbent upon the board to go through the process of carefully assessing each nominee.”
David insisted that the CSC would disapprove any appointment that did not follow set procedures, including publication of the vacancy and the creation of a screening committee.
Going through the motion
Yaokasin agreed that the board would go through the process “even if the members of the board already know the desire of the President,” the minutes read. The board then tasked the search committee to do its work. On April 28, the committee submitted to the board the names of the eight finalists, led by Pineda who scored a perfect 8, followed by Jamon, 7.67, and then Metin, 7.42. Kalaw ranked seventh with a score of 4.62.
Citing CSC rules, David suggested that only the top five candidates be considered by the board. Yaokasin, meanwhile, proposed that only career executive service officers or CESOs be considered, the DAP presidency being a career position. Only three candidates are CESOs: Kalaw, Romero and Metin.
DAP officials explain, however, that while the DAP president is required to be a CESO, the status can be obtained within a year upon assumption of office. Gonzales, a non-CESO at the time of his election, became a CESO a year later.
In the end, the trustees agreed to interview all eight candidates today.
Despite this, Yaokasin had written Cabinet secretaries who sit in the DAP board in early April to “implement the desire letter of President Arroyo” even though the board will have to go “through the motion of a (selection) process.” The letter instructed the Cabinet members to send their representatives to the DAP board with a written authorization letter electing Kalaw.
On April 26, the Office of the President itself released written instructions to the Cabinet secretaries to “support Mr. Kalaw’s immediate election as DAP president…, especially in view of some information we have received that CSC Chair Constantino-David seeks to delay his election.”
On May 11, Ermita called a meeting attended by Yaoksain and Cabinet members or their representatives to “clean up their act” in time for May 19 and ensure Kalaw’s election, says one of those present in the meeting. The meeting was presided by Lagonera.
Kalaw was also at Malacañang at the time, but he says he was in a different meeting
Best candidate?
Yaokasin does not deny the letter he sent and the May 11 meeting. He says the Cabinet members have issued authorization letters, with a number of them already stating that they were voting for Kalaw. The board is composed of eight Cabinet members who, he says, are alter egos of the President. “We have to respect the desire of the President.”
He adds that he finds no one exceptional among the candidates and believes Kalaw ought to be DAP president even in the absence of the desire letter, he being a CESO who is next in rank to Gonzales and having served DAP for 30 years.
Nevertheless, he says the board members will still interview the candidates today to comply with CSC requirements and even suggest another candidate if they saw fit.
Despite what seems to be a done deal, DAP officers and employees wrote Arroyo last May 8 appealing to the Palace to respect the outcome of the search process. “We fervently appeal to you, Madame President, to please allow the BOT (board of trustees) to choose the most qualified candidate – one who clearly has the needed competencies to lead DAP forward to face the continuing challenges that we face in the country’s development,” the letter says.
The employees said the search committee had found the other nominees more deserving than Kalaw who, they pointed out, lacks the expertise in the academy’s thrusts, which include governance, productivity and competitiveness, and development.