When Turtles Come Home by Victoria Hoffarth

Author:Victoria Hoffarth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2019-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

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Slogans are meant to change feelings. Ang bayan ko mahal ko (my country, my love) states a popular poster. This is meant to elicit feelings of patriotism, thereby pulling the “Feeling” element out of the old attitude consonance. If the pull is hard enough, it can result in actions geared towards more community and national involvement.

It has been proven, however, that it is in changes in structure, which suspend all choices available to us, that is the quickest mode to behaviour change, as it feeds directly into attitude change. This, however, also causes the most resistance to change.

If you apply the idea of cognitive dissonance in order to change attitudes, you could mitigate instances of corruption, and in the process, reduce its usefulness to the individual. Properly guided, the use of this idea will weaken corruption. The proposed use of computers related to the issuance of traffic violation tickets, for example, will standardise the process, resulting in a change in structure that could promote new behaviour patterns. So would the lengthening of the expiry of drivers’ licenses. I am pleased to hear that drivers’ licenses only need now to be renewed every five instead of three years as was previously the case (I ask: why not make the expiry even longer?) I also look forward to the time when government offices would no longer be overstaffed, when relatively minor documents no longer need several layers of redundant approvals, when you no longer need to notarise agreements of small consequence, when each office is staffed by civil servants who are paid adequate salaries, and when police officers are given living wages. A friend adds: customs officials in the airport should have desks with no drawers, and their offices should be constructed so that there is minimal privacy, with remote cameras attached to their work stations whenever possible. Perhaps, if I buy another small property, I could even get a piece of paper where all the requirements for transferring the title to my name are written down by a person of authority so I don’t have to keep going back to the Registry of Deeds to get them piecemeal. These simple structural changes will then result in less opportunities for corruption. Coupled with more efficiency, could the Philippines then perhaps improve its international standing on the Ease of Doing Business Register? In 2016, the World Bank ranked the Philippines 103rd out of 189 countries surveyed.

Who can effect these changes? It is commonly asserted that, in an organisation, it is management who can build a new culture. Likewise, it is management who have the power to change or create structures: the heads of sections, of departments or divisions, or the CEO in centralised organisations. It is unfortunate that although many Filipinos might disagree with me, it is President Duterte himself who undermines the very institutions that he is supposed to be nurturing. For the purpose of stamping out illicit drug use, he has weakened Philippine institutions geared for the purpose of administering justice

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