Tugade, aptly

“YOU EXPECT us not to be corrupt. Can we expect you not to corrupt us?”

Incoming Transportation Secretary Arthur P. Tugade – to thundering applause – articulated what could possibly be the greatest message at the “Sulong Pilipinas: Hakbang Tungo sa Kaunlaran” consultative workshop between the country’s leading businessmen and Duterte’s economic managers held in Davao City recently.

Tugade, more than anyone of his peers in the Duterte Cabinet, has the sole proprietary right over that dare to the business leaders. As we have come to know him in his incumbency as president-CEO at the Clark Development Corp. where he was reverently referred to as APT, as much for his initials as for his acclaimed appropriateness for the position.

APT instituted at the CDC a “no-gift” policy whereby even the simplest tokens for birthdays, holidays, anniversaries, product launches and inaugurations are politely declined.

Invitations by Clark locators for business meetings with CDC officials and staff over lunch, dinner or coffee were conducted during – never outside -- office hours, and always the CDC paying for lunch, dinner or coffee.

Any favor, no matter how little, coming from the locators was considered a bribe.

Office hours were government time and therefore to be spent on-the-job. Staff meetings, so as not to interfere with “official work,” were exclusively after 5 p.m. So what if some lasted until the break of dawn, what came first was that no government time misappropriated.   

And who but APT, of all those who held the CDC helm, came to Clark with only his personal driver, unencumbered by his own executive and personal assistants to dislocate those already in place.

And who but APT refused to avail himself of the CDC president’s staff house, preferring to commute daily from his Ayala Alabang home, at his own expense in gas and expressway toll charges.

Even as other government-owned and -controlled corporations and other agencies outraced one another to sign the Pledge of Integrity required of them, the CDC did so a year later, only after APT was convinced that a “culture of transparency and accountability” has been institutionalized – at his initiative – at the Clark Freeport.

Yes, Tugade is most apt as articulator of incorruptibility in government. Thus, aptly too, the resounding acclamation from the business leaders.

This, finding further affirmation in Tugade’s assurance of the Duterte administration’s commitment to “The speedy implementation of public-private partnership and infrastructure projects as well as respecting the sanctity of contracts,” listed No. 10 in the business leaders’ recommendations arrived at during the Sulong Pilipinas consultative workshops.

Once more, Tugade is most apt operative model where the sanctity of contracts matters. 

At CDC, the contracts with locators achieved near-divine status during APT’s presidency. The confidentiality clause cloaking every contract with invincibility, if not altogether invisibility, from public scrutiny.

We should know as media requests for copies of CDC contracts were responded to with the quietude of the sanctum sanctorum, especially those signed with former Pagcor chair Efraim Genuino, with “businesswoman Nora Bitong,”and one citizen Bert Lina, who later was appointed and up to this writing still is Customs chief. Ditto the contracts with the controversial Capilion Group of Companies and Honda Car Philippines which location all but strangled the main entrance to the Clark Freeport.            

And for that CDC was awarded with the Seal of Transparency, which it proudly displays in its website and proclaims at every opportunity.

Yes, the business leaders can take Tugade’s word on government contracts as gospel truth: in his belief and by his deeds at Clark, so seemingly sanctified these are as to befit a spot in the Ark of the Covenant itself.

And therefore inviolate as to submit to public scrutiny. The interest of the people be damned. Public office devolved to private trust.