Abdul-Azim D. Ontok

Nominee, 13th and 14th CIPYML

Journal

June 6, 2012

Now that I am managing to adjust to the ways of life here in MSU Marawi, I and my roommates arrived early at the venue of our very first class at the university. Before the class started, Dr. Ati informed us of the major activities that will be undertaken at the university. He said that our performance will be rated accordingly through daily quizzes and a comprehensive final examination. He further added that we will be attending 2 or 3 workshops during our 2-weeks stay at the MSU Marawi. The class formally started when Dr. Ati introduced the resource person for the entire day. He was Dr. Nasroden Guro, a former Vice Chancellor of the Academic Affairs of MSU Maguindanao and a current professor at the College of Public Affairs of MSU Marawi. Since 2004, he was a resource person during the training of CIPYML nominees at the university due to his high competence and effectiveness on delivering the subject matter assigned to him.

Dr. Guros lecture was divided into two major topicsThe Philippine Administrative and Civil Service System during the morning session and Philippine Governance: Issues and Challenges during the afternoon session. He strongly emphasized that the three branches of the Philippine government are equally powerful and dependent to each other even though they have separate powers. He further described these three branches of government and clearly defined their functions. Moreover, Dr. Guro stressed that the countrys administrative system is greatly influenced by our cultural values which contradicts the Weberian Bureaucracy from which the system was derived.

The highlight of the afternoons lecture was the good governance and the issues and challenges that aggravate its implementation. He said that corruption, which is now becoming a more serious problem of our country, directly rooted from the practice of non-good governance. Eventually, he presented a list of ways and means to combat the corruption in our country. In some ways, Dr. Guro assured that if our government shall practice good governance, poverty will be reduced and national development will be achieved. Even though a power outage took place during his lecture, he still managed to draw attention from us.

From the way that he presented his lecture, Dr. Guro has shown great competence of the topic and a good sense of humor. I enjoyed the entire lecture and I have learned much from him. I gained a better knowledge of the administrative system of our country and the problems surrounding it. But the drawback was that he has told some stories which are somehow irrelevant of the topic. Dr. Guro sometimes loses his focus and unfortunately, this resulted to losing some precious time.