SATURDAY, APRIL 27, 2024
Plastino D’Costa
In just a few weeks the Chief Minister of Goa from a position of strength and full control of the situation of keeping Goa protected from the pandemic, seems to have squandered the opportunity, as today Goa faces increased number of case. Apparently someone had broken the bubble the Chief Minister created for the state, or made Goans believe that we had zero cases and safe in the green zone. The Health Minister seems to have tried his best and made some right noise, but a breach was already committed and eventually Goa was unable to stop the import of the pandemic.
In this fast evolving situation, chances are we will never have the time and resources to get to the bottom of finding out the reason why Goa ended up with so many cases. But there could be two scenarios at play here, either we had cases in existence and hid them, or the checking at the border was as usual lax and we allowed people to enter Goa by our casual attitude or for some monetary consideration by hoodwinking the waiting health workers. For all we know, these officials could be only following orders from politicians to smuggle people inside Goa by not using designated routes.
A sudden increase of cases turned a confident and in control Chief Minister of Goa into a defensive and insecure one. In the initial phase of the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown we saw him address every issue that came his way, in a transparent and professional manner. The fact he kept reporting to Goans on a daily basis gave the impression that we had somebody at the helm that was willing to report to the citizens and explain his decisions, even if circumstances were fast evolving and many a times would force him to change decisions the very next day.
In the process the Chief Minister was setting a precedent of creating a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for politicians to report to the people directly. There is a possibility, that this routine might have upset the higher ups from his party. A party, that hardly believes in consultation or reporting to the citizens the decisions they make on behalf of the people of the country. The Prime Minister himself hardly bothers to report to the people of the country and his absence from live press conferences is a proof that he really does not believe in answering to the people of the country.
Coming back to Goa, the Chief Minister reduced the frequency of reporting to the people mostly because he had nothing nice to report and secondly he was heavily trolled on social media by a miniscule percentage of Goans who seem to have forgotten that criticism can also be done in a decent manner. The biggest criticism being, that he does not have an immediate answer to some questions and promises to come back later. Unfortunately we have now pushed the Chief Minister to learn the art of bluffing the people if he does not have proper answers. Our slave mentality does not allow us to think that politicians are human and sometimes they need time to answer questions, we expect a ‘know-all’ superman type of a politician who gives answers fully knowing they are meant to pull wool over our eyes.
The Chief Minister must also learn to accept that social media is a two way communication and it is an occupational hazard everybody has to endure, especially politicians, as most parties have hired professional trolls whose job is to create a chaos of the mind. Therefore trolling cannot be used as an excuse to shy away from reporting frequently in these difficult times. To put an end to ambiguity in reporting it is time Goa starts focusing on creating a SOP for the Chief Minister and subsequently all ministers that makes direct reporting to people of paramount importance, a practice he inadvertently started at the beginning of the pandemic. Answering the opposition questions in the assembly is all fine but they could be fixed and even outdated sometimes.
A procedure of reporting is surely not going to go down well with his political party and for that matter even opposition parties, but that is precisely what is needed to weed out politicians who find it difficult to understand the meaning of accountability. Every profession and job has a SOP that has to be followed so as to eliminate stress, measure performance and ensure continuity, why should politicians be left out? Imagine we agree on a strict one term political term for an individual combined with a SOP to follow, it will fix most of our country’s problems.
If a SOP was in place, Goa could have been in a real bubble, free from the pandemic, but that was not to be, since the Chief Minister did not have the power to tell the Central Government that he will not be able to allow people to come into Goa and change the colour of our zone. He probably succumbed to some arm twisting from his own party at the centre and was not able to hold the Goan fort. He should have made the choice of keeping Goan interests above his party command.
There is some learning to do from this pandemic, one of them being that decisions for Goa cannot be taken from Delhi alone. Panchayats announcing their own village lockdowns goes to show that even Panjim is too far away to make decisions for villages of Salcete. Technically it might not be playing to the rulebook but it is time to devolve the decision making process, and create a new SOP. No point giving a SOP only to doctors and health workers while other arms of the government are allowed to work in their old corrupt ways. It has not only cancelled out the great effort put in by the medical fraternity of Goa but created an extra burden on them.
(Plastino D’Costa is a business consultant)
