As the year ends

It’s a time for review and reflection, as it is when a cycle is about to end. It is not so easy to assess where and how we stand in life because that are seamless, we move from one moment to the other, and it is dangerous when we do not move at all. But we are forced by lesser laws, like governance and economics, to be inside time capsules – days, weeks, months, and years – and, then, be judged accordingly.

Budgeting time is over, which means that for several months, Congress and the Senate have been focused on next year’s plans and what it would take to make government life go on. However, because of the timing of the budget-making and review, in the midst of an operational year, review and reflection are at a minimum. But unlike our lawmakers, I can focus on selected areas, express my views, and share my concerns.

2023 has been a difficult and challenging year to Filipinos, and I must include even those who have controlled the government. The major highlights have mostly been negative, whether our fault or not. There must have been blessings, too, but far outweighed by the problematic.

Remember the runaway prices of the most basic of commodities like vegetables and rice? Remember inflation rates that scared even our economists who had to find ways to diplomatically tell the truth through language calisthenics? The administration must be thankful that the common man does not understand the full meaning of inflation. Price increase would have been the more honest term, price increases of fuel, electricity, cooking gas, and other everyday items that people, especially the poor and ordinary citizen, would need to buy.

If understanding inflation is hard enough, what more, then, the national debt? I still remember just a short 7 years ago when our national debt stood at 6 trillion pesos. Then, it ballooned to 13 trillion under Duterte and now at 14.5 trillion after one and a half years of the Marcos Junior presidency. Do Filipinos really understand the ramifications of the national debt and how it contributes to our buying less for more money?

Running a government on deficit can sometimes be a necessity. But doing so for other purposes can be a crime. Yet, no one is held accountable for it. Government spends more money than it makes and collects, forcing it to borrow more and more. It gets away with it because if most Filipinos do not understand what inflation means, how the national debt is capable of making our daily lives difficult as hell.

How will we understand what credit ratings mean, how we are rushing headlong into a financial situation that can smash the value of our currency and allow international debtors to run our lives? In 1986, the government had gone bankrupt and it has taken us 30 years to recover. If we forget, then another lesson is in the offing. That is the law of life and the long reach of karmic consequences.

Not content with inflation, smuggling of rice and vegetables, crunching price increases for fuel, electricity, and their derivative goods and services, we become witness to the reality of confidential funds. We hardly minded confidential funds because we did not know much about it. Also, most cannot equate it to the loss of government services just so we can give our highest officials huge funds with little or no accountability. Confidential funds are treated like private allowances for the big boys.

If confidential funds are truly necessary, let the government stop naming them for the purposes they are granted. In fact, they are discretionary allowances that are exempt from accounting. And, by the way, a certification by a public servant without the relevant details is not an accounting. It is merely that – a certification that legally substitutes for an accounting. How anomalous to have to write about the reality of confidential funds in a national poverty situation. It can be fitting, though, when mention in the context of national corruption.

We had also witnessed an early controversy about the logo design for our tourism drive. I do not like to go into the details of that except to see its impact on our tourism industry. I recently saw the Tourism Secretary proudly claiming that we had hit our target for 2023. I was happy hearing that – until I saw that the target was a measly 4.8 million tourist arrival.

I know we had been in a pandemic, but so have all our tourism competitors in South East Asia. I cannot understand how the Philippines, with the world’s most famous beaches, El Nido and Boracay, will target 4.8 million tourist arrivals when Indonesia has 9.9 million, Vietnam has 11.2 million, Singapore has 11.3 million, Thailand has 24.6 million, and Malaysia has 26 million.  Is it our pride to be ahead of Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar?

Lastly, and most painful, I watched an interview of an SWS officer who shared very recent findings about the high positive ratings of the DepEd coming from interviewed respondents. I had to swallow that reality even as I matched it with our shameful learning poverty situation and the PISA survey results showing our 15-year old youth are 5 to 6 years behind the global average scores for math, reading, and science. But if the SWS survey results are accurate as well, then our people, the Filipino adult population, are happy with their children’s generation not being academic, not being intellectual, and not being smart.

I am not angry, just a little frustrated to see things go down the drain, and so despondent at how Filipinos can be so approving of substandard results – even when children are the victims. Please, Christmas, lift my spirit. It is the only collective inspiration that can do it now. It is not enough that my family and I are ok. We must all hope, pray, and work until most Filipino families can find hope, opportunity, and more moments of happiness in our motherland.