P-Noy’s first year: Needs Improvement
P-NOY sang the praises of National Housing Authority General Manager Chito Cruz during the turnover of housing units ceremonies to members of the Philippine National Police last June 30. He pointed to Cruz as proof positive that appointing a kaibigan/kaklase/kabarilan (I think Cruz fits into the first two) is not wrong. See, he said, Cruz delivered, as promised, 4,000 socialized housing units.
I winced when I read his remarks, but let them pass in the hope that these would not be repeated. And apparently, so did most people, because I did not read or hear any negative reactions to his statements. However, his speechwriters must have assumed that silence meant consent/agreement, so lo and behold, in the most recent housing turnover ceremony, P-Noy repeated the same praises and defended his KKK employment practices again.
Enough. Time to disabuse him on the two counts, as well as to correct another misimpression he seems to hold. He should make every effort not to leave himself wide open for an opposition just waiting to pounce, with knives at the ready. Any reduction of P-Noy’s credibility is going to be bad for the country, and for all of us collectively.
There is no question that constructing 4,000 housing units as of the end of June or third week of July represents an accomplishment. But you can’t stop there. The next question has to be: How does the accomplishment compare to the NHA targets? Is the NHA on track or off-track (slow)?
Per the Philippine Development Plan (PDP) 2011-2016, the NHA “direct housing provision” targets for 2011 are 70,000 units, divided as follows: 42,000 for Resettlement; 20,000 for Slum Upgrading; and 8,000 for Local Housing. The 2011 target is 50,000 units higher than the actual 2010 performance. That’s a pretty big jump, so I went to the NHA website to see what it had done so far along these lines, considering that its 2011 budget of P4.4 billion is P800 million larger than last year’s. Alas, I saw nothing but pictures and press statements (the HUDCC website is worse: it still posts the names and pictures of Winston Garcia, Romulo Neri, Gary Teves, Hermogenes Ebdane, Tito Santos, and—Esperon as heads of support agencies). No sign at all that the NHA is following the 2011 budget law mandating the publication of information on the status of projects, list of project beneficiaries, and procurement plans. So much for transparency.
Thus, there is no available documentation about what has been done by the NHA other than the 4,000 housing units reported in the press. But that seems a far cry from the 70,000 units targeted for this year. If P-Noy is going to crow about the 4,000 units in his State of the Nation Address, he better also tell us how far along the NHA is with respect to its targets.
In other words, there really is no basis for crowing about how great Chito M. Cruz is, and therefore, no grounds for saying that KKK works.
But even assuming that Cruz is doing an excellent job, concluding that KKK works as a basis for choosing public officials still is a great leap of faith, because, if this basis is to be consistent with what P-Noy promised, then there is an implicit—and heroic—assumption that KKK must necessarily also have the highest competence and greatest integrity.
The President must understand that nobody will question his choice of KKK if their names were among the best and the brightest that were shortlisted by his headhunting committee. The questions and criticisms came because it was obvious, sometimes painfully so, that most of his KKK did not or could not qualify in any objective short list.
Now that we have gotten that out of the way, there is one more misconception that P-Noy seems to hold, at least insofar as his recent pronouncements are concerned, and that has to do with rice. I sincerely hope that his SONA will not advert to the possibility of rice self-sufficiency by 2013, for heaven’s sake, the way he did during his first anniversary report.
Apparently the possibility occurred to him or his speechwriters because palay production for the first quarter of this year increased by 15 percent. That is certainly true. But a closer look at the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics data will show that the increase in production was due to an increase in area planted rather than to an increase in yield per hectare, which would of course show an increase in productivity. While the 2011 yield was greater than that of 2010, there was no significant difference from the 2009 yield (the 2010 yield having been affected by “Ondoy” and the like). And if they just do a little arithmetic, they will find that unless our appetite for rice (per capita consumption) decreases, and/or our incomes increase (which cuts rice consumption because we can then afford other food), and/or our population decreases, there is not a snowball’s chance in hell of attaining rice self-sufficiency (zero imports) by 2013.
So, please. There should be no crowing about housing and about rice. These would be indefensible.
This is not to say that the administration’s performance is an unmitigated failure, and if the opposition insists on this view, it would be dead wrong. The Movement for Good Governance (of which I am nominal head) has made assessments of different aspects of the Social Contract, and finds that the progress that the administration has made is less than what it set out to do.
In other words, its performance Needs Improvement.
