How this year will go will depend on how last year went. And last year was pretty much defined by the way it ended. Two things happened.
One was a cause for lamentation. The economy fared badly, little aided by Christmas spending. We would be lucky if we got a 4 percent growth rate for 2011. Poor public spending and global recession were promptly blamed for it. But as Noel de Dios pointed out in a thoughtful article last month, that isn’t so at all. The slump in government spending reduced the growth rate for the first three quarters only “by at most two-tenths of 1 percent.” And Indonesia and Vietnam are on their way to getting 6-7 percent.
The cause, De Dios suggests, is far more serious. We are probably looking at the beginning of the end of “remittance-led growth.” For the last couple of decades, that is what has sustained us, the dollars coming from the OFWs creating a huge demand for malls, real estate and (imported) consumer items. “The problem is that once deployment and remittances flag, the fuel for this type of growth also begins to run out and the engine sputters.” We saw the first signs of that last year. With turmoil in the Middle East and declining demand, actual or anticipated, for overseas work, the OFWs began spending less, with these alarming results.
Alongside this, several groups warned about the far more alarming scale of poverty in this country. “Our nation is in an explosive situation,” said Cagayan de Oro Archbishop Antonio Ledesma during a summit on poverty and inequality last month. “Streets all over the country are teeming with beggars and dislocated indigenous peoples. The children of the poor wake up to poverty, eat poverty for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and sleep poverty—without understanding why. There is a proliferation of poor households in bangketas, above esteros, under bridges, on karetons, on hillsides and even in cemeteries.”
When Ledesma said this, a wrath-of-God cataclysm hadn’t yet visited his archdiocese. The scenes of death and devastation, prelude to want and homelessness, in Cagayan de Oro beggars even his description of the lot of the poor.
The other thing that happened late last year was a cause for celebration. P-Noy made a series of dazzling moves. He prevented Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo from leaving the country and escaping prosecution despite the Supreme Court’s efforts to aid and abet her in that respect. Subsequently, the courts slapped charges of electoral fraud and graft against her. Congress swiftly voted to impeach the Chief Justice for obstructing justice. And the Department of Justice ordered the arrest of Jovito Palparan, the one person who gave a face to the culture of impunity.
It was the first time a Philippine administration showed an iron resolve to right wrongs, to pave the way for a brighter future by cleansing the past. In that respect, P-Noy went past the postwar government that failed to punish the Japanese collaborators and even his mother’s government which failed to punish the custodians of martial law. For the first time, you had a sense of a President determined to push corruption to the sea. For the first time, you had a sense of a President determined to make justice the hallmark of his rule.
Those are the two streams that will flow into this year’s river. The usual suspects, of course, will use the first against the second, harping on their favorite mantra that P-Noy has embarked on the second to cover up his failings in the first. But even the sympathetic must see that P-Noy’s government has to tackle the twin problems of poverty and a faltering economy with renewed zeal. If the problem goes deeper than merely underwhelming public spending, then a series of low growth rates over the next quarters could seriously undercut P-Noy’s efforts to reform the country. Hard to think lofty when you are hungry.
I myself do not see it as a choice between focusing on the one or the other. It’s not just because both can be done at the same time, it’s because the second is intricately linked to the first. Justice is linked to fighting poverty as breath is to life.
At the very least, that is so because corruption is the single biggest contributor to poverty in this country. True enough, pag walang corrupt, walang mahirap. At its most basic, in the sense of pillage, corruption plucks away food from the mouths of starving children. At its deepest, in the sense of poisoning institutions, corruption leaves a nation dying in the wayside. That was what the last regime did: commit pillage so staggering it rivaled that of martial law, and mount a culture of impunity so impregnable the Ampatuans thought nothing of doing what they did. Nothing has impoverished this country more than this. Nothing will enrich this country more than punishing those that did it.
At the very most, that is so because as economists themselves have shown, justice is the cornerstone of any effort to fight poverty, whether nationally or globally. Fighting poverty is a moral concept. Inequality is the twin of poverty in this country. We have one of the most spectacular cases of it in the world, palaces in Ayala Alabang left dark and empty when their owners vacation abroad while a dozen people squeeze into a cardboard box, made from the placards and streamers of candidates, in Payatas in a raging storm. Inequality is social injustice, which comes from the lack of justice generally in this country.
We start seeing justice as a fundamental demand, we start pushing back the culture of impunity. We start seeing justice as a fundamental right, we start pushing back the sway of inequality. We start seeing justice as a natural condition of life, we start to stop the vicious cycle of poverty.
I hope that is how this year will be.