The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
Dean dela Paz / The Next Page
It was rather telling that in the midst of ostentatious and indecent plenty, under the glistening Palace chandeliers, the most luxurious coiffures, the reddest rouge and the stiffest starch set upon the most portly and powerful, the most influential, and in some, the wealthiest and fattest pork barrel-fed politicians, the Holy Father, iconic for humility and simplicity, needed to cite “glaring and scandalous social inequality” and beg for its necessary response.
Indeed, there was a stark disconnect with the presidential pomp and pageantry. The occasion compelled a didactic from the perspective of morality. Before such grandiose and celebrated political power and authority, on a cause that should not have been alien to civil servants, the Pope found it necessary to teach, advocate and encourage true compassion. Later, even more ironic, and perhaps to drive home his advocacy, he defined what true compassion was, most eloquently, not by the bland and inert textbook definition that politicians might have better understood, but instead, via the opposite.
The Pope’s was a prepared speech before a more apt youthful and innocent audience at the University of Santo Tomas, written way before he might have realized that among those who should have listened more closely, joining the President in that initial foray and oftentimes tailing like a hirsute posterior appendage, one Cabinet secretary’s concept of compassion remains stubbornly defined through doles – the conditional cash transfer (CCT), that ill-advised billion-peso centerpiece program of the government.
Listen to the Holy Father’s deeply insightful words that day before the youth and discern what political factotum refuse to hear as they fatten and perpetuate a program that is quickly sinking into the mud, slime and sludge of political patronage the closer we get to 2016.
“There is a worldly compassion which is useless. It is a compassion that makes us put our hands in our pockets and give something to the poor. But if Christ had had that kind of compassion he would have greeted a couple of people, given them something, and walked on.”
The conditional cash-transfer (CCT) program had its local origins with then-Secretary Corazon “Dinky” Soliman of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) under former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. For various reasons among which, we surmise, was the failure to account for the billions spent, the accounts remain without closure as social inequities fester and escalate.
When the CCT (now called The Pantawid Pamilya Pilipino Program or 4Ps) was resurrected under the administration of Benigno Aquino III, we prayed that the CCT would this time help alleviate poverty and lead to a noticeable inclusive improvement in gross domestic productivity (GDP). What operational improvements are to be instituted this time around should be founded on the “Straight Path” precept that presumably differentiates the current CCT even as its proponent is a straddling common denominator.
The program was allotted P21 billion in 2011. Despite the immediate explosion of operational inefficiencies surrounding “ghost” beneficiaries and multiple-allotments this nearly doubled to P39.4 billion in one year. In 2013, the government raised the doles to an unprecedented P44.25 billion. This year, on the eve of presidential elections, the amount will again be at a historical high.
At the onset during Aquino’s first full year in 2011, we were hopeful that other than inclusive GDP growth, the CCT, with an arsenal now valued at over a fifth of P100 billion of our taxes, the doles would narrow worsening Gini Coefficient gaps, alleviate the involuntary hunger incidences, improve the self-rated poverty perception and effectively shove a good number above the poverty line.
No such improvements came. According to a recent Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey on self-rated poverty, the national average for 2014 worsened to 54 percent. This is the worst since 2006 and is the lowest level under the Aquino administration under which the CCT bloated the most. Interpolating from the data, even with ever-increasing billions in doles to augment family incomes, the poor feel poorer and actually feel poorer than they have ever felt. As a dole to alleviate poverty, the “pantawid” program has bridged nothing.
Analyzed against even more frightening reports from the Commission on Audit (COA)-audited books of the DSWD, the term “scandalous social inequity” attains newfound horrors. According to the COA “the weak or even seemingly lack of processing, internal accounting and reporting controls, if not addressed immediately, would further result in the unmanageable portion proportion of unliquidated advances.”
This was particularly relevant in a recent COA report that revealed as much as P4.936 billion in Philippine Postal Corporation unliquidated advances. These were 1,000 percent higher than the P449.841 billion in unliquidated balances in 2012. The DSWD disputes this, saying that the unliquidated advances amount to only P1.6 billion.
Even as the DSWD claims that liquidation among subsidiary agencies is on-going and the amounts are as they claim, the fact that we are here referring to fiscal years 2012 all the way to 2014 indicates that these politicians in the frontline of poverty alleviation care very little for the funds entrusted to them that they would keep unliquidated and unaccounted accounts open and then have the gall and temerity to insist on the doubling their allocations year after year.
True enough there is a worldly compassion that is useless. Imagine a politician on the campaign trail parlaying empathy that makes him dig from his pocket to hand doles to the poor, greeting a few, giving them something, and then walking on once the moment is passed.