EDITORIAL: Juan and the beanstalk

[August 2007 issue]

In her thirteen-paged speech, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo outlined the billion peso infrastructure projects lined up for the future alongside the public-works projects that the administration has already completed. “The speech was like ‘the state of infrastructure report’,” stated Bayan Muna representative Teddy Casiño. Moreover, he remarked that the President’s address was three-fourths about infrastructure but stated nothing of definite plans to take in hand the issue of poverty and unemployment.

The President prides herself on a fiscal-development proposal supposedly attainable in 20 years. Investments in intellectual, physical, legal and business infrastructures have been created as a resolution to boost business confidence. With such reforms lined up to yield a so-called better Philippines inching alongside Asia’s economic Goliaths, the country—by 2010—can finally be regarded as nearly first world.

A preposterous pipe dream it is, if you may, setting aside optimism we tried so hard to hang on to for who-knows-how-many presidential SONAs. Economic development is an essential prerequisite for poverty reduction, but reality is, not all progress is pro-poverty. Sometimes, politicos should learn to shake off the all the highly-cerebral dialogues on political affairs and get down to the basics.

The very basic argument of bureaucracy—for instance—has a considerable effect on a country’s income growth. The government, handled by a battalion of civil servants is structurally incompetent with ineffectual agenda-setting, and policies, and a mounting corruption within the system triggered by wrong mindsets and attitudes. The country’s burdensome bureaucracy is plagued with gaps and overemphasis on policies and procedures minus the consideration for the accomplishment of intended outcomes and results.

Along with what was aforementioned, a country’s pathetic judiciary and security issues also play a fundamental role in the economic governance of a country.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one illustrates a government spiked with superficiality. Behind the gala of ornate gowns and a speech on the impossible carnival of billion-worth infrastructures is a mum society—corrupting in the venom of its own poison.