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By Tita C. Valderama Philippine
Center For Investigative Journalism
(First of two parts)
Her handlers portray her as a
hardworking president, but after eight years in power, Gloria Arroyo
is looking more like being long on show and short on substance.
Indeed, while critics and
observers acknowledge specific successes by her administration, they
point out that more fundamental concerns were neglected in the
pursuit of achieving these.
The emphasis on high-profile
projects and “feel-good” programs became even more pronounced
after the “Hello, Garci” scandal broke out in July 2005 and lent
credence to allegations that massive cheating, vote-buying and other
poll irregularities had marked the 2004 elections. Critics say that
this led President Gloria Arroyo to become more preoccupied in
proving her administration’s legitimacy.
As a result, economists Benjamin
Diokno and Solita Monsod, both of whom teach at the University of
the Philippines School of Economics, gave President Arroyo an
overall failing mark in the 10-point agenda she set out to
accomplish between 2004 and 2010.
Using the University of the
Philippines grading system, in which 1 is “excellent” and 5 is
“failed,” Diokno gave the president an average of 3.86, rounded
off to 4, for “conditional failure.” Monsod, in a 1 to 100
rating, gave the President an average of 47.17 where 50 percent is
the passing mark.
But Diokno and Monsod differed in
grading Mrs. Arroyo—who earned her PhD in economics at UP—on her
goal to achieve a balanced budget. Diokno, who was the Budget
secretary of the President’s immediate predecessor, Joseph
Estrada, gave Mrs. Arroyo a failing grade of 5 for the large
deficits from 2001 to 2005 and ending her term with record-high
deficits of at least P250 billion by yearend and another P200
billion plus in 2010. In contrast, Monsod generously gave the Arroyo
administration a perfect 100 rating for being on track on its
deficit projections in 2007 and 2008.
Beat odds or beaten?
One hundred days after she was
sworn into office as president for the second time in 2004, the
President unveiled her Medium-Term Philippine Development Program (MTPDP),
the road map to realize her 10-point agenda presented in the
catchphrase: “BEAT THE ODDS.”
Each letter stood for a goal,
thus: B-balanced budget; E-education for all; A-automated elections;
T-transportation and digital infrastructure; T-terminate hostilities
with the MILF and NPA; H-heal the wounds of EDSAs 1, 2 and 3;
E-electricity and water for all; O-opportunities for livelihood and
10 million jobs; D-decongestion of Metro Manila; and DS-develop
Subic and Clark.
J. Nereus Acosta, a professor at
the Ateneo de Manila University School of Government and the Asian
Institute of Management, says that the administration “can
rightfully boast” of a few areas where it can claim moderate to
large success: a balanced budget, some big-ticket infrastructure
projects and the meeting of some targets for education, such as more
computers in schools and the construction of new classrooms and
school buildings.
But Acosta, a former three-term
congressman who was on Mrs. Arroyo’s side during her first three
years in office, notes that the administration’s infrastructure
projects have been plagued by overpricing and corruption.
Economist and Freedom from Debt
Coalition Vice President Rebecca Malay, meanwhile, criticizes what
she says is the President’s “obsession” to balance the budget
by reducing expenditures for basic social services like health and
education and increasing the “easy” taxes, particularly the
Reformed Value-Added Tax (R-VAT) that has raised billions of pesos
for the government since 2005.
During the Estrada
administration, the per capita expenditure for health was P201.
Under the Arroyo presidency, it went down to P184. On education,
annual per pupil expenditure was P5,830 under Estrada, and down to
P5,467 under Mrs. Arroyo. According to Malay, the effect could be
nothing less than “deleterious.”
Education is central to
development and a key to attaining the Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs) and the Education For All (EFA) commitments to the United
Nations. It is deemed the most powerful instrument for reducing
poverty and inequality.
Unfortunately for the President,
even some of her allies in the House may agree with Malay’s
assessment.
‘Academic crisis’
Rep. Danilo Suarez of Quezon, who
heads the House oversight committee that monitors and reviews the
President’s SONA commitments, for one, says that while Mrs. Arroyo
may have met her targets on construction of classrooms and reducing
the density between classrooms and students and the number of
teachers per students, her efforts to address the “academic
crisis” are far from what is desired.
This is particularly true in
access to information technology, adds Suarez, who points out that
only 20 percent of the population are computer-literate. “If you
have 80-percent illiteracy in this particular field,” he says,
“you have an academic crisis.”
He clarifies, though, that the
fault is not entirely Mrs. Arroyo’s, since she inherited the
problem from previous administrations.
Rep. Carlos Padilla of Nueva
Vizcaya says that judicious use of limited state resources is key to
meeting the country’s targets in assuring access to education to
all children of school age.
“If funds are not forthcoming,
you can never improve the quality of education,” adds the former
educator. He notes that the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization (Unesco) sets the minimum share of
education in the national government budget at 6 percent of the
gross domestic product (GDP), the total value of goods and services
produced in a country in a year.
In the 2009 budget, the allotment
for education grew by almost P20 billion from the previous year. In
terms of share of the national budget, however, the amount received
by education actually shrank 11.87 percent, from 12.2 percent in
2008. This represented a drop of 2.36 percent of GDP, from 2.5
percent in the previous year.
On a per student basis,
investment in education has been declining in real terms.
Enrolment in public elementary
and secondary schools grow at an average of 1.8 percent a year, but
per student budget declines by an average of 0.3 percent, according
to the 2008-2009 Philippine Human Development Report.
A study commissioned by the
National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) says that the
government needed to infuse P44.2 billion more to education this
year to be able to meet the EFA goals.
To Padilla, ensuring quality
education means providing sufficient funds for quality instruction,
facilities and curriculum. But he says, “The situation we have now
is that we can’t even provide for higher salaries for teachers to
be able to attract the best talents to the teaching profession. We
can’t capture the best minds among our high school graduates to
take up education course and become teachers because of the pitiful
salary rates.”
Alarming drop
Enrolment in education courses
has dropped from 19.3 percent in school year 2000-2001 to an
alarming rate of 15.3 percent in 2004-2005.
The entry level pay for public
school teachers is at a range of P10,933 to P12,997 a month, which
is way below the poverty threshold income of P16,380.
The low salary rate and the
current economic situation are among the primary reasons why some of
the country’s best teachers are leaving for the United States, the
Middle East and other Asian countries.
Data from the Philippine Overseas
Employment Administration (POEA) show that 1,666 teachers left the
country in 2007, most of them trained in specialty subjects like
Math, Science and English. The number does not include those who did
not pass through POEA, those rehired, and those who found other
employment such as caregivers and domestic helpers.
The same data show that more than
4,000 newly hired teachers have left the country, majority of whom
went to the United States. Teachers began leaving the country in
significant numbers in 2000. A total of 241 teachers opted to seek
better employment overseas that year, according to POEA records.
While Mrs. Arroyo has repeatedly
said that deployment of Filipinos overseas is not her government’s
policy, one of the reasons she has given for her frequent travels
abroad was to help enhance the overseas market for Filipinos.
Jobs: Goal failed
Creating at least one million
jobs a year is another goal the Arroyo government has failed to
achieve. If at all, what has been generated was temporary employment
and small-scale businesses under programs called OYSTER
(Out-of-School Youth Serving Toward Recovery) and CLEEP
(Comprehensive Livelihood and Emergency Employment Program).
According to National Statistics
Office (NSO) administrator Car-melita Ericta, employment rate stood
at 92.5 percent in April 2009, a slight improvement from 92 percent
in April last year. By comparison, unemployment decreased from eight
percent last year to 7.5 percent this April. This was based on the
quarterly labor force survey that placed the number of employed
persons at 37.8 million out of 59.1 million in the labor force who
are 15 years old and older.
But the assertion raised several
eyebrows at the House, especially the data showing the highest
employment rate of 98.5 percent and the lowest unemployment rate of
1.5 percent in the poorest region in the country, the Autonomous
Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). Metro Manila had the lowest
employment rate of 86.5 percent and the highest unemployment rate of
13.5 percent.
Rep. Roilo Golez of Parañaque
City was even moved to remark that the poorest region in the
Philippines has a far higher employment rate than the whole of the
United States, where the corresponding national figure is at some 10
percent amid the global economic crisis.
In truth, there seem to be
several sets of “official” labor numbers floating around, all of
them depending on how a particular agency defines or sets the
parameters of terms like employment, unemployment and
underemployment.
Even Representative Padilla has
apparently become so confused that he is now questioning the huge
disparity in the number of jobs created between 2004 and 2008 as it
appears in the reports of the Presidential Management Staff (PMS)
and NSO.
Discrepancies in stats
According to the PMS, 11.4
million jobs were created in the last five years. The NSO report,
however, puts the figure at less than four million. Comments
Padilla: “I would have let it pass if it was just a difference of,
say, up to10 percent, but the disparity is almost three-fold. It
really puzzles me.”
“I am not trying to be
malicious,” he says. “I don’t want to embarrass the President
if she says there were 11.4 million new jobs created since 2004. I
just want them to explain why they have this claim.”
Congressman Suarez, though, says
that the congressional oversight committee reviewing Mrs. Arroyo’s
SONA commitments would use the NSO data. He adds that these are
consistent with the figures from the Labor department and the
pension agencies. The PMS data, says Suarez, took into account jobs
generated in the small and medium enterprises that obtained loans
from government financial institutions.
The PMS may have also factored in
other data, if figures given by Trade Secretary Peter Favila are to
be considered. According to Favila, the government’s lending
program for micro, small- and medium-enterprises (MSMEs) has lent
some P305.57 billion to some 5.6 million beneficiaries since 2004
and in the process created 2.5 million jobs. If that figure is added
to the NSO statistics that would still mean the PMS new-job count is
in excess of some five million.
To some, however, such
statistical discrepancies are par for the course for an
administration that has long been accused of glossing over its
shortcomings and creating diversions instead of squarely facing the
mounting allegations of fraud, graft and corruption. In the process,
the search for real solutions to the country’s many problems has
been forgotten altogether.
Governance sacrificed
Opposition Sen. Benigno
“Noynoy” Aquino 3rd, who says the Arroyo administration has
“sacrificed” governance “for political expediency and sheer
survival,” cites one particular example.
“In the four years since
renewable energy was used to smokescreen the ‘Hello, Garci’
issue, and the country’s well-being was sacrificed, it is only
reasonable to expect that the government has accomplished its goal
of turning renewable fuels as a sustainable source for our energy
needs,” says Aquino. “However, the government opted for
solutions, such as the use of the jathropa plant as a source of
renewable fuel, which ended up needing further study.”
Acosta’s assessment of the
Arroyo presidency is more biting: “No amount of BEAT THE ODDS
variable successes can compensate for the larger ‘political
economy’ sins of the present administration: far-reaching
institutional damage across government and an overall, nationwide
sense of malaise and social distrust.”
“The latter, I believe, is
foundational,” he explains. “Social trust is fundamental
when we particularly speak of governance. Programs and projects can
be individually celebrated, and subject to ‘spin’ for media mileage
and political capital, as it were. But if the government is
distrusted, institutions are instrumentalized for political gain,
and leadership labors under a persistent cloud of doubt over
its legitimacy, it cannot be judged as having served the public
weal.”
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