Why NOT Mar Roxas?

April 27, 2016

by benign0

The question of whether or not one should vote Mar Roxas President of the Philippines can be answered quite simply: DO NOT. Why? Because he fails to live up to his own platform of governance. According to a meme being distributed by his supporters, Roxas and his side-kick Leni Robredo supposedly live by a simple three-point campaign platform.

Here is why Mar Roxas fails to be consistent with each of these three points.

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Hindi bara bara

“a systematic approach to governance”

Part of being systematic in the way one governs — or, for that matter, even just manages — is to delegate tasks. Clearly, Mar Roxas cannot delegate. In various instances he is shown personally directing traffic under the rain, carrying around sacks of onions in a marketplace, motorbiking into the eye of a storm without a helmet, and even awkwardly attempting to hammer a nail into a school desk.

A chief executive who needs to personally oversee day-to-day tasks is not an effective manager. It indicates a lack of an ability to trust people under his administration who are charged with specific areas of responsibility.

Hindi patsamba

“strategies and plans based on accurate data and facts”

In the aftermath of the devastation wrought by super-typhoon Haiyan in late 2013, Roxas (who was, again, a cabinet secretary-level exec personally overseeing relief and recovery operations at Ground Zero) was interviewed byCNN International correspondent Andrew Stevens. Stevens had observed that days after the exit of Haiyan, decomposing bodies of its victims remained scattered all over the disaster area. Despite evidently being ignorant of the facts at hand, Roxas responded in an ill-informed and, worse, an arrogant manner…

Stevens pointed out that every day, he sees the same decomposing bodies when he passes by the same road on the way to the city. But Roxas vehemently denied they were the same bodies, stopping short of calling Stevens a liar.

Roxas failed Management 101 at several levels. For one thing, instead of being on top of the situation, he preferred to be at ground level where things were a bit more dramatic for the cameras. This is what, for another thing, likely kept him in the dark. Commanders usually oversee their armies from a high vantage point while their foot soldiers on the battlefield each work on a need-to-know basis. In that instance, Roxas positioned himself at the wrong level of the situation and therefore did not have the right information to make the right decisions, take the right actions, and give Stevens the right answers.

Hindi pakitang-tao

“authentic, compassionate service to the Filipino people”

There really is no need to elaborate on this one. The hundreds of memes circulating the Net depicting Mar Roxas in various pretentious poses (to add to those cited earlier, posing on a block of ice, distributing relief goods to typhoon victims, personally attending to a scene-of-crime situation at an SM Mall) is proof that he suffers from that renowned Filipino condition, pakitang tao-itis. He just can’t help it. Perhaps because he lacks any real management chops he focuses instead on drama and, as an outcome of that, delivering small-time results.

Indeed, the assertion that he is “compassionate” in his “service” itself is debatable if one takes into account his behaviour towards staff of the presitigious Wack Wack Country Club where he was suspended in 2014 for viciously abusing a staff member there.

A club member, who asked not to be identified, said the board met Monday night and voted to suspend Roxas for two months after an investigation of the April 6 incident when Roxas purportedly screamed at club employees who insisted that he pay the green fee of a guest.

“Five [directors] voted to suspend him for two months while only one voted to simply reprimand him. Three [other directors] abstained from the vote while one was absent from the meeting,” the member said.

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Why NOT Mar Roxas? Simple. If, as a mere cabinet secretary, Roxas already fails to lead by example and deliver significant results, then Roxas as President will almost certainly be a disaster for the Philippines.

So to all who plan to vote for Mar Roxas, isip isip muna. Do not participate in these critical democratic exercises the way certain non-thinking sectors of Philippine society do.