NAYSAYERS are creating a ruckus saying President Rodrigo Duterte's P8.4-trillion Dutertenomics of "Build, build, build" will shackle the country in debt for generations to come.
The longest contention comes from the opinion article of one Anders Corr, principal at risk analysis company named after him, the Corr Analytics, in Forbes Magazine, contending that the $167-billion debt that he claims will be lent by Beijing to fund the Dutertenomics will grow to $452-billion on a 10 percent interest rate.
He even paints a worst-case scenario of China imposing a high interest rates on the new debt that can bring "Philippines’ debt to GDP ratio to 197 percent, second-to-worst in the world.” Duterte's economic managers, however, say that the concept of taking the build-build-build program funds all from China does not have any basis.
In a briefing in Beijing, Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez said 80 percent of the infrastructure fund will be locally generated and 20 percent will come from external creditors, thus the importance of passing the proposed comprehensive tax reform program. Naysayers are saying this is impossible. We can understand why. It's in the Filipino psyche. Filipino psyche says if you need to build anything, you take out a loan. That's just how we have been preconditioned to do. Filipino psyche says the national government is always cash-strapped. That is just how we were conditioned to think.
But, looking back through the convoluted recent history of corruption scandals, we can better understand why Filipinos were made to think poor. It is so that money can be stolen everywhere, and still the Filipinos will not think anything wrong with a cash-strapped government. Remember just one private individual: Janet Napoles.
Apparently, Napoles has mastered the ropes of government corruption she is even being accused of masterminding the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) scam. How a private individual can mastermind a government scam is a myth we are being made to swallow, just like us being poor. Napoles is wily, yes.
Her fingers were already dipped in corruption since the early 1990s, from a shipyard myth in Cebu where she ran away with millions of investments from gullible investors, to the substandard kevlar helmets purchased by the Armed Forces of the Philippines in 2001, to tax evasion between 2009-2011, to the Malampaya royalties worth P900-million, to the fertilizer scam, and then the PDAF scam. The amount scammed by private individual Napoles can be as big as P10-billion, we are made to believe.
Common sense will say that for P10-billion government money to be released to one private individual, there must be a much higher amount sucked out by those in authority. Corruption alone has been sucking our government coffers dry. How often were we made to beg for help when disasters strike. It was all the government did in the past administration: beg.
On the first year since the Duterte Administration took over, government has not begged for help yet, and yet it is operating on a budget created by the past administration yet. In that tiny window into how government runs and is being sucked dry, we already get a glimpse of how huge the budget is that falls into the hands of the corrupt.
There we can better understand why an old retired non-government worker turned Cabinet Secretary, Judy Taguiwalo, tasked to head the Department of Social Works and Development, is one of the least liked Cabinet Secretaries of the Duterte Administration by politicians. We can better comprehend why until now, Taguiwalo cannot be confirmed and looks like the traditional politicians manning the Commission on Appointments (CA) will be slamming the doors on her.
Taguiwalo, after all, may be among the poorest Cabinet members, but she guards a goldmine. In the meantime, we still nurture the belief that we are poor when all this time it was the corrupt who made us believe this so that they can run away with the billions without us knowing any better. But we are so much wise now.