CAGAYAN de Oro City ground to a halt yesterday.
If you were stuck in the humongous traffic gridlock that choked the city's thoroughfares, you have City Hall's weekly "People's Day" to thank.
Let's look at the numbers vis-a-vis efficiency in our city government's public service. City Hall proudly touts that 7,193 residents received dole-outs — five kilos of rice, medical consultations, and financial aid.
In a vacuum, 7,193 sounds like a formidable achievement in public service.
But do the math. Cagayan de Oro's official population now stands at 741,617, based on the 2024 PopCen. Those 7,193 beneficiaries represent exactly 0.97 percent of the city.
Given the massive gridlock it created yesterday, that is a mere drop in the bucket. We paralyzed the economic mobility of the remaining 99.03% of Kagay-anons to serve less than one percent.
How much business and productivity was lost yesterday? Every delayed, every employee late to work, and every commercial transaction stalled represents a tangible economic hemorrhage for the city.
When the logistics of a weekly dole-out disrupt the daily engine of a highly urbanized city, we have to question the administration's definition of "public service."
Under Commission on Audit (COA) Circular No. 2012-003, state auditors are tasked to disallow "irregular, unnecessary, excessive, extravagant, and unconscionable" (IUEEU) expenditures. Add to that COA's Value-for-Money (VFM) audits, which measure government programs against three absolute metrics: economy, efficiency, and effectiveness.
When you factor in the massive procurement of dole-out goods, the unquantified economic damage of manufactured traffic jams, and the diversion of salaried City Hall personnel from their mandated desks. One Facebook post even shows a WASAR unit holding back the crowd.
This leaves critical functions like tax collection, civil registry processing, and essential Frontline services stalled while they play glorified relief workers. Assessed against these metrics, "People's Day" fails the VFM test spectacularly.
Spending highly localized resources in a way that paralyzes the broader city economy is the textbook definition of an unnecessary expense — one that, in COA's own words, "cannot pass the test of prudence" and shows "non-responsivenes to the exigencies of the service."
A 0.97% reach at the expense of citywide paralysis fails the efficiency test.
True governance isn't about setting up tents to manufacture long lines of dependent constituents for the cameras.
It is about creating systems that deliver public services seamlessly, without shutting down the local economy.
If City Hall genuinely wants to bring the government closer to the people, it should decentralize these services efficiently at the barangay level. Whatever happened to the different departments of City Hall? What is the purpose of the bureaucracy if its managers are micromanaging "public service?"
A weekly political circus is no substitute for a working local government bureaucracy. Governance by spectacle is just bad math, and the rest of us Kagay-anons are footing the bill.
