Goes without saying

Editorial

The way the conditional cash transfer (CCT) is being run shows Noynoy’s flagship program is going the way of the political manipulations warned by a banker who has extensive knowledge of similar programs in Latin America, from where the Philippines adopted the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps).

Inter-American Development Bank vice president Santiago Levy, in a round table discussion with media sponsored by the Asian Development Bank, related the dangers of the CCT ending up as a campaign tool of the incumbent party during election periods.

He said governments are tempted to manipulate the funds during an election year and that the only counterweight for such possibility is a strong legislature, a strong press, and lots of information.

All three which we, in this country, don’t have under the yellow administration.

He said that a government committed to preventing the dissipation of the funds into the campaign kitty of the ruling political party would devise ways to limit the use of the funds during the election period such as suspending the registration of new CCT recipients six months prior to the holding of elections.

That would not be the case for the 4Ps of Noynoy since the budget for his flagship social program will be ramped up to P45 billion in next year’s budget from about P40 billion this year.

The Commission on Audit (CoA) already found some P3 billion unliquidated disbursements of the CCT for 2011 when the budget for its was around P21 billion and only after media picked up a CoA report on the discrepancy was the use of the missing funds accounted for.

Levy related that the ruling political power does not even have to rechannel the funds as the experience in some Latin American countries had the government agents merely needing  to hand down a tacit requirement that the CCT recipients vote for certain candidates.

Indeed the amount is so huge that there would be an ever existing temptation of the incumbent political force to be creative in its use. One of Dinky Soliman’s social workers, for instance, can just drop a hint that the continuation of the program depends on most of the allies of Noynoy being elected to pursue the straight path and that would be a strong message to the recipients on what to do at the polling station.

Levy said there should be an assurance to the poor that they are entitled to receive benefits regardless of their political leanings. He said that, for instance, the recipients should not be required to participate in any political meeting or vote for anybody.

Yet it seems the 4Ps is a perpetuation of the so-called hakot system of patronage where dole-outs are guaranteed in exchange for political support. Replace the straight path with the Liberal Party in each of the speeches of Noynoy or any of his allies and the poor who depend on the monthly government stipend would not bat an eyelash in handing their votes.

Levy said that even in countries where the best CCT programs have been implemented such as Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, leaks are rampant and that the only solution to this is frequent monitoring.

In the Philippines’ case, Dinky Soliman herself had said the Department of Social Welfare and Development greatly lacks personnel to monitor the 3 million families enrolled in the program. Soliman had said that non-government organizations fill up the slack in the monitoring process.

The leakages in the Latin American experience average 30 percent and include some families who don’t need it but get the dole-outs anyway which was already proven in the case of the 4Ps based on past CoA reports that found a substantial number of the recipients as having gainful means of subsistence and do not need the dole-outs.

Levy ended by saying that increasing jobs is the only fool-proof program on poverty reduction and that the government should focus its energy toward this goal.

A look at the priorities of Noynoy, thus far, shows that industrial development, which provides employment for the poor, is not a priority and instead the focus is on business process outsourcing job generation which has a limited effect on the employment prospects on members of the poorest families.

Dole-outs for the poorest of the poor, which is a solid potential 6 million votes within the family CCT recipients, thus is the answer.