I LAMENT the fact that I have built so many databases in the span of my government service, but all of them are gone now, having been the victims of changing priorities and changing administrations.
Well, I just said that I built those databases but that does mean that I did it all by myself, because database building is always a team effort.
The question here is not so much on who really built those databases, but whether or not these were sustained.
Since the answer is no, it goes without saying that we owe it to ourselves to find out why that is so, and how we could prevent that from happening again.
Not to be irresponsibly critical, but it seems that the government is inherently incapable of sustaining databases for posterity, because of its intrinsic limitations.
This is not to blame anyone in government or anybody for that matter because the criticism here is institutional, and not personal. For one thing, government agencies have to go through many difficult rules and regulations before they could go into projects that would require multi-year appropriations. And even if government agencies could do that within a six-year presidential term, it would be difficult for them to go into projects that would cut across several terms.
Going straight to the point, the problem in this case is not technical and instead, it is political. The bottom line of this is the lack of long-term political wills that could last generations, hopefully forever.
In fairness, we could say that there could be some political will that would emerge every now and then here and there, but this would only last until the end of the term of a party or a coalition in power. This is actually the root of the problem, because many databases would die every time the political climate would change, and thus the budgetary priorities would also change.
The remedy therefore is to establish databases that are immune from political changes, following the legal fiction that our country has long term needs that should not be politicized.
Just to cite a few examples, I was already able to build a national crime information system, a national finfish database, a database to monitor pollution in bays and coastal areas, and a database of outbound Filipino Overseas Workers (OFWs). I would rather not mention the government agencies that were supposed to maintain and sustain these databases, because any more finger-pointing and blame-throwing would do us any good. Instead, we should just learn from our past mistakes and move on, albeit with some care that we would no longer repeat our past mistakes. (To be continued)/PN
