Leadership, according to planning expert Glenn Miller, is one of the great intangibles. We recognize it when we have it and when it is lacking, the vacuum can seem impossible to fill.

Indeed, there are people whose leadership qualities are evident, and there are those whose pretensions are utterly obvious. Of the latter, no matter how they try to hide their deficiencies with monetary persuasions, political patronage and brute force, the leadership vacuum can easily be noticed in the resulting organizational disarray.

But while leadership is intangible, it manifests in those who have gifts to lead. These people can become subjects of case studies on what leaders are made of, and from whom we can learn lessons for emulation. And we need not go far to find one.

Art Defensor, who yesterday declared that he is running for governor of Iloilo in the 2010 elections, is armored with leadership qualities that distinguish him from his peers.

Becoming the first mayor of Mina, Iloilo at a young age of 29, Defensor displayed political integrity when he opposed the Marcos dictatorship. He fought corruption during a period when almost all the other politicians were basking on the power and the wealth that were doled out by the ruling Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (KBL).

His nine-year stint as governor showed his incorruptibility. Not a single graft case can be attributed to him. In fact, in order not to offend suppliers and contractors who would send him gifts during the Yuletide season and at the same time not violating the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards of Government Employees which prohibits officials from receiving gifts, Defensor simply erected a Christmas tree at the entrance of his office at the old Capitol building where Christmas presents can be placed. Those gifts were then raffled to capitol employees during the Christmas party.

Of course, none of those gifts include cars or a house and lot that may be considered bribe in exchange for huge deals, but he was just too careful so as not to be misinterpreted. Technically, elected officials can still receive gifts but how would one react when a gift comes from someone who had been asking for a favor? This may be trivial but this reveals the character of the man.

Defensor is also a man with a vision. If we want to thank someone for the New Iloilo Airport in Cabatuan, it should be Defensor. It was he who saw to it that the project gets funding from the Japanese after the Philippine government found the offer of the German government-run bank Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KFW) too prohibitive.

It was the Germans who first made the feasibility study of putting up an airport on the former Japanese airfield, but KFW said it will fund it on a six-percent interest. So the Philippine government, finding the offer unreasonable, thought of shelving the project. But Defensor had another idea. Learning of the Obuchi fund, he worked to have the project submitted to the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), which readily accepted it at a very low 0.9 percent interest. And the P8.7-billion airport was born.

It was also during Defensor’s stint when all the watersheds in the province of Iloilo underwent massive rehabilitation. In fact, he was the first governor to get elected and re-elected under an environmental platform. The problem during that time was not flooding but the dwindling supply of potable water. The Maasin watershed, for example, only had two percent forest cover left then, and the scarcity of water was hampering Iloilo City’s growth. A drastic proposal then was to declare the Maasin watershed a no-man’s land, but the Regional Development Council (RDC) recommended social agroforestry to be the strategy for the rehabilitation of the uplands.

Defensor came in. The report Winning the Water War published by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) reads in part: “When he assumed office, Governor Arthur Defensor declared that the policy should be: Trees should coexist with people. Thus a task force was created on the Rehabilitation of Maasin Watershed (which eventually became the Iloilo Watershed Management Council). It formulated rules that sought to balance protection of trees and the livelihood of the people. Ordinances were passed by the municipal LGU to implement the agreements at the Task Force.”

“The task force was able to mobilize funds and conduct an annual planting activity personally led by the governor to underscore the need to protect the watershed. Five hundred hectares were replanted from the fund contributed by the city folk. Upon the request of the governor, the DENR released P3 million from its general fund to facilitate community organizing from 1992 to 1994. In 1995 the DENR Forest Sector Project, which was created to rehabilitate the watershed, obtained a site development fund for another 3,500 hectares through a loan from OECF (now the Japan Bank for International Cooperation or JBIC),” says the same report.

Paul Von Ringelheim described leadership as the ability to do and not the ability to state. In these trying times when good governance is evidently wanting, when principled politics is obviously absent and when environmental action is critically important, Iloilo needs someone who has that capacity – the capacity to govern honestly and selflessly. We need someone who is a true leader, and the name Art Defensor stands out.

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