Photo credit to Allvoices
While delegates to the Asian Development Bank annual meeting discussed ways to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor in the region last week, the Aquino administration tried to insulate the rich from the poor by putting up walls that hid the squatter shanties along the esteros near the site of the ADB.
Probably thinking the ADB delegates didn’t see the sorry sight beyond those walls, President Benigno S. Aquino III went on to boast what he described as economic gains made by his administration. He talked about the “27 times in 22 months” during his two-year-old term that the stock market index rose to record levels while forgetting to mention that the Philippine economy grew by a measly 3.7 percent last year and would be lucky to reach a 5-percent growth this year. He pointed to the continued appreciation of the peso when in fact it has only made matters worse for poor families, many of them dependent on money remitted by their OFW family member. The peso appreciation depreciated the value of their money remittance.
And even as he boasted of his administration’s alleged economic strides, the Social Weather Station reported that the number of Filipinos who rated themselves as poor increased by two million from the last such survey in December last year. The survey found that 55 percent of the respondents or 11.1 million considered themselves poor.
Aquino’ drumbeaters can claim that the poverty level is well below the record highs of 74 percent for self-rated poverty recorded in July 1985 in the last year of the Marcos regime and the 59 percent for self-rated food poverty in April 1994 during the Ramos administration that was repeated in September 2002 during the Arroyo administration. But in 2009, poverty incidence was only 26.5 percent, 26.4 percent in 2006, and 24.9 percent in 2003. Poverty incidence surveys are done once every three years.
These figures show that the Aquino administration has miserably failed in its poverty alleviation program. Instead of reducing poverty incidence by 2 percentage points every year as targeted under its Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of reducing poverty by half in 2015, the administration has, in fact, increased the poverty incidence level by 10 percentage points in just three months!
The pace of economic growth dropped from 7.6 percent to 3.7 percent since he took over, and the number of poor Filipinos has grown to its highest level since his first day in office, and yet he felt confident to report that his administration has made economic strides in two years before a group of economic managers?
Nobody among the economic managers obviously cared to listen to the speech that tried to hide the failure of his administration to minimize poverty by even just a bit, just as nobody among the ADB delegates perhaps cared to look behind the wall that tried to hide the stark reality of the Philippine economy.
With the Philippine population growing yearly by more than 2 percent and economic growth crawling at about 4 percent, the unemployment rate remaining at 7.2 percent and underemployment rate at 18.8 percent, the chances of reducing poverty in the country look very dim, indeed.
Amid all these, Aquino refuses to push the Reproduction Health Bill that would hopefully slow down the rapid population growth that has, without a doubt, contributed largely to the increasing poverty in the country. His poverty alleviation program, on the other hand, relies heavily on the Conditional Cash Transfer program that cost P29.2 billion in 2011 and P39.4 billion in 2012 which could have been spent better in massive vocational training and livelihood programs.
Under the CCT program in the Philippines, each household receives a P500 monthly allowance to subsidize its basic food needs plus P300 for every child that goes to school. A maximum of three children can get the allowance. While the World Bank described it as a “prudent safety net” for poor families during tough economic times, the danger here is that like the overseas workers program, the CCT program is boosting the mendicant mentality among Filipinos and that like the OFW program, which was launched as a temporary program during the oil crisis in the 70s, the CCT program might become a permanent policy that would instill dependency and complacency among the poor Filipinos.
During his ADB speech, Aquino again put the blame on the past administration’s corruption for the poor performance of the Philippine economy. While we agree with him that the Arroyo administration was corrupt, he cannot continue making that fact an excuse for the failure of his administration to improve the lives of the people.
For two years, Aquino put to a virtual stop all public works projects on the excuse that his administration had to review all the government contracts that he said were tainted with corruption. The construction standstill has contributed to the unemployment problem, slowed down the economy, and scared foreign investors who became even more wary of the government’s ability to honor contracts.
After two years of this supposed sustained campaign against corruption, the Daily Tribune points out that the Philippines remains at the bottom of the world’s corruption perceptions index (CPI) at 129th place with an index score of 2.6 out of a perfect 10, “a mere 0.2 point improvement from the latter part of Gloria’s term when the accusations against her were at their worst.”
And for all the distractions and the adverse effects on the economy brought by its supposed intensified drive against corruption, the Aquino administration still has nothing to show for it. The corrupt officials of the previous administration remain free, except for Gloria Macapagal Arroyo who seems to be enjoying her hospital rest; only two contracts have been scrapped (the French ro-ro project and the Belgian Laguna Lake project), smuggling remains rampant, and corruption in all government agencies continue as the CPI index shows.
“Kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap,” Aquino stressed during his 2010 campaign. Two years later, “marami pa ring corrupt at lalo pang maraming mahirap.”
Aquino cannot go on building walls to isolate the rich from the poor, and illusions from the reality. Instead, he should start removing the walls of corruption, injustice and insensitivity that have prevented the poor from wading out of the murky waters of poverty.
(valabelgas@aol.com)
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