Wednesday, July 25, 2007 Carvajal: Macro rhetoric vs. micro reality By Orlando P. Carvajal Break Point
AT first blush it sounded very good, but somehow I found myself unable to join those who gave President Arroyo a big round of applause at the end of her State of the Nation Address (Sona). Instead, when she declared that the state of the nation is strong, I heard myself adding “but the people remain poor.”
I am not trying to be a pessimist here. I just want to look at the state of the nation from a micro perspective which in the end is all that really counts. On the macro level the country would seem to look good, but the micro reality remains that of hunger, homelessness, ill-health and ill-education for the country’s millions of poor who must now wait for the trickle effect of PGMA’s massive investment on hard infrastructure.
For a country whose biggest poor sector are the small farmers, the Sona was disappointingly wanting in relevant programs to improve the lot of small farmers. The President boasted of farm to market roads but said nothing, for instance, of improving productivity through soft crop loans that remain the most insurmountable barrier to small farm productivity.
PGMA bragged about the adequacy of hard infrastructure to continue the same ineffective educational system when instead we should be making substantial reforms to make education relevant to the needs of today’s job-seeker. There are more jobs available but the Filipino graduate of the present educational system is hardly qualified for these jobs. For what jobs, for instance, are Filipino high school and college graduates qualified these days?
Much ado was made of more cheap medicines made available in more barangay boticas. Yet one could easily make a case for the cause of this phenomenon being the increase in incidence of sickness due to poverty and its attendant poor nutrition and lack of hygiene and sanitation.
The President can stop extrajudicial killings and disappearances by just simply ordering it to stop. At the Sona instead, she asked Congress to enact stricter laws with stiffer penalties on extrajudicial killings. God only knows when Congress will do this, if at all. Besides, how credible is she here when she makes such a request in the wake of an anti-terrorism law that makes disappearances and extrajudicial killings easier to do?
Finally, instead of giving us the number of convictions (of, for all we know, lowly bureaucrats), the progress report on the fight against corruption should have consisted of names of high government officials convicted. Then we can believe that we have progressed in our fight against corruption.
The macro rhetoric simply does not match the micro reality of crippling poverty for an unacceptable number of Filipinos.
