Withered hopes

By: Juan L. Mercado
Philippine Daily Inquirer

“Shriveling from hunger is not the stuff of headlines,” Viewpoint noted three years back (Inquirer, 11/6/09). “Morning headlines and evening newscasts are wedged between political pap and crime.”

There are more undernourished children and nutritionally at-risk pregnant and lactating women, perfunctory reports on the 7th National Nutrition Survey revealed then. “Kids below 5 years were more emaciated, shorter and skinnier…”

That issue went poof. You are always moving on to the next headline, our critics snap. “Reporting significance is often a thankless chore,” that Inquirer column rued. “But it is essential—if the national debate is to move beyond today’s political drivel.”

A Summit on Poverty, Inequality and Social Reform last week did that neglected task with blunt dispatch. “The children of the poor eat poverty for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and sleep poverty—without understanding why they are such,” Archbishop Antonio Ledesma, SJ said. “There is a proliferation of poor households erected right on the bangketas, above esteros, under bridges, on karitons, even in cemeteries.”

It has been 25 years since Edsa. Where is that non-violent revolt’s promise for more humane lives? asked conference co-convenor Christian Monsod. Poverty and inequality remain embedded in today’s “cacique democracy.”

The income of the top 1 percent of families equals total earnings of the bottom 30 percent poor. The elite “make the laws, dispense justice, implement programs and control media.”

Incidence of poverty has been whittled down, surveys show. It was 35 percent in 1988. That dipped to 26 percent in 2009. But the number of destitute surged from 21 million to almost 24 million, the head count shows.

“There is something wrong about these great imbalances and use of these advantages to influence politics and policies for the (elite’s) own interests or deny justice to 99 percent of our country,” the summit said. “This must change.”

“Poverty is the worst form of violence,” Mohandas Gandhi observed. A cacique democracy institutionalized that often unseen but lethal violence over the decades.

Did President Aquino need to bristle over the summit’s call to prioritize the poor?

The P21-billion Conditional Cash Transfer program provides P1,400 cash assistance to a poor family. Parents keep their kids in school and get them vaccinated. The program started with 800,000 out of 4.6 million families wedged below the poverty line, P-Noy recalled. It now helps 2.3 million families, a hefty 300-percent increase in just a year and a half.

He ticked off a P10-billion program to house in the next five years about 120,000 informal settler-families. He also said the government deployed 20,000 nurses and midwives and beefed up vocational skills training, etc. etc.

Pulse Asia, this week, reported that “about seven in ten Filipinos (71 percent) trust in President Aquino. Less than one in ten is critical of the president’s performance, 8 percent thumb him down and 7 percent distrust him.” “Even if you are on the right track, you can still get run over,” Will Rogers once cracked.

More significant, Mr. Aquino’s harshest critics grudgingly admit that this President is not into sleaze. Think Ferdinand, Erap or Gloria.

P-Noy’s predecessors systematically pillaged from the top. The result is that people today huddle in “bangketas, above esteros, under bridges, on karitons, even in cemeteries.”

A partisan ombudsman, meanwhile, has been cashiered. Warlords like the Ampatuans are in the clink. Tax evasion cases against once untouchables, like Rep. Mikey Arroyo, have been filed. But watch how “Arroyo justices” dig in their heels.

Even an untainted President can not dismantle this decades-old, warlord-rigged oligarchy in just over a year in office. Neither can Mr. Aquino completely undo this mafia within the remaining five years of his term. Get real.

He has made a start. “Making the beginning is one-third of the work,” an Irish proverb says. However, more is expected of his watch. Why? Far too much was dissipated in the past, at great human cost.

Population surge, resource depletion, pendulum swings of climate and rising expectations stoked by modern media and migration, meanwhile, interlock. They slice into elbow room, not just for the President, but for all institutions.

“Many of the things we need cannot wait,” Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral wrote. “The child cannot wait. Now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood made, his sinews developed. To him, we cannot say: Tomorrow. His name is Today.”

Yet local governments failed to use P876.8 million available from the 20 Percent Local Development Fund in 2010, the Commission on Audit reports. Budgets for some unimplemented projects were appropriated as early as 2004. The year before, 102 LGUs couldn’t use P650.6 million for the poor.

This trust fund is designed to address the needs of the most deprived: nutrition, health care, sanitation, primary schooling, etc. As in previous years, many governors and mayors “misused” their LDFs as mini pork barrel. Despite a prohibition clamped on earlier by Local Government Secretary Jesse Robredo, many continue to splurge on honoraria and travel, build waiting sheds nobody uses, pad payrolls with ghost employees, etc.

Quick to junket or crib allowances for themselves, many local officials prove inept—or indifferent—to projects that relieve penury.

“Shriveling from hunger is not the stuff of headlines.” But the victims are just as dead.