Leadership legacies from Fidel Ramos

Notes read at Akademyang Filipino’s Perspectives on the Presidency forum, on August 26, 2021.

Good afternoon. I am delighted to be here.

When I received the invitation to join this exchange of perspectives on the Presidency, in a collective attempt to draw “leadership lessons for No. 17,” I said yes for two reasons. First, no one in his right mind would say no to Chair Conchita Carpio Morales. And second, I really wanted to know what Maris, Apa, and Manolo think!

I think of this little presentation of mine as a small price to pay to hear them speak.

To begin:

I did not vote for Fidel V. Ramos. In 1992, I voted for his ideological opposite: Senator Jovito Salonga was on the opposite side of Ramos on most of the big issues. But on the question of personal character, I actually think that they were very much alike. They were both men of personal integrity, possessed of iron self-discipline, who led by personal example, and, to borrow Maslow’s term, were capable of extraordinary feats of self-actualization.

I did not know Salonga enough to know whether beneath his earnest countenance he was also a funny man. But Ramos has always been a jokester, quick with a quip, ready with a prank.

The first time I met Ramos one on one was in Malacanang, when he was Defense Secretary and I was a young aide to Oscar Villadolid. He told me he was flying out later that night to visit a military camp. I’ll parachute into the camp with a case of beer, I remember him saying. “Sama ka?” On the chance that this was not a joke, I passed.

I have three points to make about the leadership legacy of Fidel V. Ramos, summarized in this incomplete formula: mc2.

M stands for MANDATE

Ramos was elected President with the smallest mandate in Philippine history: 24 percent. With the exception of Carlos P. Garcia, all the presidents elected before the 1987 Constitution was in place earned a majority of the votes cast. Under the 1987 Constitution, all our presidents have won election with a mere plurality of the votes cast, somewhere between 39 and 43 percent.

Ramos’ mandate was an outlier; it is the only example we have of what I have taken to calling a 20-percent presidency. The most important factor that determined that outcome: At least five of the presidential candidates in 1992 enjoyed almost equal strength, almost all the way to Election Day.

But fast forward to 100 days into his presidency. A survey conducted at around that time by the Ateneo de Manila, which was fresh off a polling partnership with Social Weather Stations, found that some 50 percent of Filipino voters remembered having voted for him only a few months before!

I realize that science may have an answer for this, or at least a theory, like the so-called spiral of silence, to explain it—but from my perspective, this survey finding is actually proof that there is more than one way to generate a mandate. After the election, Ramos took decisive control of the national government. The sense of drift that had overtaken the last years of Cory Aquino’s term dissipated under Ramos’ confident exercise of executive action. The sense of doom stoked by various coup attempts began to lift when public opinion took account of the fact that a professional soldier had just assumed the presidency. And the worst crisis the country faced, the debilitating power shortages that had gone on for years, was on their way to resolution.

I cannot find a copy of that survey at the moment, but I remember being struck then that the question was about previous voting, not current support. “Did you vote for him” is dramatically different from “Do you like or support him now.”

If it were the latter, then that would have been simply another instance of the public rallying around the new president after an election. It happens all the time. (It is interesting to note that, immediately after the May 2016 elections, the foulmouthed President-elect, Rodrigo Duterte, had a much lower trust rating than Vice President-elect Leni Robredo. By the time of his oath-taking, however, President Duterte had raced past Robredo in trust ratings in a second survey. For many of us, a position of power IS proof of trustworthiness.)

But that it was the former, the fact that some 50 percent of Filipino voters remembered voting for Ramos, says something about how Ramos’ decisiveness, and the decisions he made, must have made an impact on voters’ self-perceptions. Why would someone who did not vote for Ramos assert that he did? Was it only to “feel good” about one’s self, or to congratulate ourselves on our choices? Or was it because the momentum of Ramos’ decisions had created a sense of participation; to be more precise, it had enhanced our self-perception as participant.

I would like to propose that this is the real meaning of mandate-making. Leaders create, not so much a sense of participation, but a community, a coming-together, of participants.

C is for CONSTITUTIONALISM

I can understand why, until he finally stepped down from the presidency, Ramos continued to face criticism about the depth of his commitment to democracy, the rule of law, and the constitutional order.

He was present at the creation of the monster that was Marcos’ martial law; he continues to bear responsibility for his actions (or his failures to act) during the Marcos era as the chief of the national police and then as vice and acting chief of staff of the Armed Forces. He also explored the possibility of changing the Constitution, when he was president, to allow reelection.

But it should be clear now that, in the end, and to the end, he retained an abiding loyalty to the primacy of the Constitution; he had what we might call a constitutional sense.

He could not conceive of taking action outside of the parameters defined by the Constitution—whatever the Constitution was. That explains why he was scrupulous about following the different iterations of the Marcos constitution; that explains why he stopped nine coup attempts in his capacity as chief of staff and then as defense secretary.

And that explains why he defected from Marcos. He reached the point where he finally saw his second cousin as THE disruption to the constitutional order. To be sure, when he joined forces with Juan Ponce Enrile, there was the prospect of arrest and execution, which clarifies the mind. But I would like to argue that this constitutional sense was truly part of his character. It explains him.

I do not mean to recast that underlying skepticism about his constitutional bona fides as unjustified. When it comes to possible threats to the constitutional order, whether it’s nationwide martial law or a revolutionary government, we should always be prepared with a vigorous defense, and defense begins with healthy skepticism.

But I believe Ramos has passed the test of time. There is no gainsaying his constitutional sense, and his fidelity to it. When I think of the possibilities open to him, during the era of the coup attempts, to choose the other side—which would have completely changed the country’s history—I appreciate all the more that he knew his limits.

Constitutionalism is, at its core, about a sense of limits.

The second C is for COMPLETE STAFF WORK.

By now, complete staff work or CSW is familiar to many of us, if not as a habit or a practice, then at least as a concept. President Arroyo, herself a detail-oriented chief executive who worked hard and expected her staff to keep pac, institutionalized the practice in 2004, and in 2019 Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea issued a memorandum circular “strengthening the standards of complete staff work.”

But it was Ramos who popularized it by insisting on it. He must have acquired the habit in his military training; it seems that “complete staff work” has its start in an army setting. But, really, how many ex-generals have earned a reputation for themselves as a creative, adaptive, resourceful leader through complete staff work? Ramos learned it, but he must have added something more to the mix; I note now that he once said his civil engineering background had made him the kind of person who thought in terms of solving problems.

So complete staff work was an ethos, yes, but it wouldn’t have worked without the right kind of leader at the top.

Cielito Habito, who served as Ramos’ economic planning secretary, once wrote an entire column on the subject of “CSW, coordination and coherence.”

Of CSW, he wrote: “All of us in his Cabinet knew what it meant. Getting a document marked with those letters back from the president amounted to a rebuke, essentially conveying that ‘you haven’t done enough homework’ or ‘you need to coordinate further with other officials concerned.’ He would not affix his signature on any executive or administrative order, presidential appointment or other presidential issuances unless convinced that his standard of CSW had been satisfied.”

It didn’t hurt that Ramos recruited the best talent he could find. Ciel, who is a colleague of mine and of Manolo’s in the Inquirer’s Opinion page, is just one out of many possible examples: He did not know Ramos and did not even vote for him. But Ramos asked him to head NEDA anyway, because he was the best person for the job.

A competent, even brilliant staff helps complete the work. But the purpose of all that preparation is particular to the leader. As Ciel writes: “CSW protects the leader from half-baked ideas, voluminous memos, and tentative conclusions. It implies a lot of work for the subordinates, but allows greater freedom and focus for the leader.”

What good is complete staff work, if the leader for whom the staff completed the work does not know how to handle, or recognize, the greater freedom for action that complete staff work makes possible? What good is complete staff work if the leader does not have the capacity to focus and to follow through?

Good leadership completes complete staff work.