Sona: Yes, but…

by Antonio C. Abaya
from Standard Today

President Arroyo was most effusive, most entertaining and most exuberant when she was firing broadsides at some of her most severe critics. The sarcasm was delicious, the irony well chosen, and the bile delivered with the right amount of pointed arrogance.

Bravo! It saved her (last?) State of the Nation Address from being one long boring litany of some unverifiable claims and some outright false ones.

Said she: “The noisiest critics of constitutional reform tirelessly and shamelessly attempted Cha-Cha [or charter change] when they thought they could take advantage of a shift in the form of government. Now that they feel they cannot benefit from it, they oppose it.”

The man hiding under his desk in shame, in a manner of speaking and assuming he feels any shame, was former House Speaker Jose de Venecia, who led the Cha-Cha dance in the Lower House in 2005-06 when he expected to be named interim prime minister in an interim parliament.

But when he lost the speakership, after his son Joey ran afoul of First Gentleman Mike Arroyo over ZTE kickbacks , JdV suddenly became a critic of Cha-Cha. Ouch!

Said she: “Those who live in glass houses should cast no stones. Those who should be in jail should not threaten it, especially if they have been there.”

In jail? When was a luxurious country villa in Tanay mistaken for jail? Or perhaps President Arroyo regrets that she ever pardoned the convicted plunderer resident in the villa.

But former president Joseph Estrada, feeling alluded to, fired back sarcastically that President Arroyo’s claims of economic gains were “fiction.” “Arroyonomics is a kind of economics that is out of touch with reality and real facts.”

Touché, Erap. Arroyonomics is actually a required subject in the Balic Balic School of Economics.

And, saving the best for the last, President Arroyo plunged her stiletto into “those who want to be president,” to whom she gave “ this advice: If you really want something done, just do it hard, do it well. Don’t pussyfoot. Don’t pander and don’t say bad words in public.”

To which the presumably pussyfooting Sen. Mar Roxas, who famously used the P word in a public speech, replied. “The only reason I used bad words in public, Gloria, is because you do bad deeds in private.”

Galing, talaga! Don’t you just love the way our top elected leaders growl at each other?
I now appreciate the pearls of wisdom that Sen. Miriam Santiago once threw at Joey de Venecia and Benjamin Abalos, whom she characterized (correctly) as squabbling over kickbacks from the sordid ZTE contract Magbarilan na lang kayo sa kalye!

Now for the boring part.

Not surprisingly, President Arroyo devoted the greater part of her SONA reciting a litany of her achievements, especially in the economy, over the past eight years and six months since she took over from the impeached and convicted plunderer Joseph Estrada.

Among the many achievements she listed down were: the Subic-Tarlac highway, international airports, seaports, roll-on roll-off nautical highway, telecommunications advances, tourism, 600,000 call center agents, cash handouts to 700,000 of the poorest families, lowest inflation, farm-to-market roads, irrigation, fish-farming, cheaper medicines, rent-control law, Epira, indigenous energy, bio-fuels, increased tax effort, more classrooms and schoolhouses, education highway, doubled foreign exchange reserves, 33 successive quarters of GDP growth, economy did not shrink the in the current global recession, $2,000 per capita income, eight million jobs created, flood control, peace talks with the Communists and the Muslim separatists, peace in Mindanao, martial law never declared despite provocations, strong government, etc.

These are real achievements, at least many or most of them. Yes, but…..

Is the glass half-full, or is it half-empty?

In my article of October 03, 2001, published in the Philippine Graphic Magazine, titled GMA – The best there is, but her best may not be good enough, after my only one-on-one conversation with her, on Sept. 29 in Malacanang, I wrote that “The bad news is that her best may not be good enough to save this country from a fate worse than death: humiliating poverty and insurmountable mediocrity….”

In her SONA, she boasted of 33 successive quarters of GDP growth since she took over in January 2001. Yes but the average of these 33 quarters of continuous growth is only about 5.3 percent per annum. Higher than that achieved by President Aquino (4.3 percent), President Ramos (3.75 percent) and President Estrada (2.26 percent).

But much lower than that required to reach First World status, which she claims she can lead this country to attain. I reminded her in 2001, as I have reminded her several times since, that “based on the experience of our successful neighbors, it takes at least 20 years or 80 successive quarters of at least 7 to 8 percent GDP growth per annum, achieved largely through manufacturing, for a country to graduate from poverty to prosperity…..”

President Arroyo is proud that the Philippine economy has not shrunk below zero even in the current global recession. Yes but that is because the Philippines did not industrialize for exports to the same extent as all our successful neighbors did. The economies, for example, of Singapore, South Korea and Japan have shrunk by 10, 7 and 6 percent respectively, as the markets for their industrial and manufactured exports dried up..

On the other hand, the Philippine economy is expected to register zero growth or even grow by 2 percent in 2009. That is because the output of our industrial sector – actually mostly only assembly plants – do not make up as large a percent of our GDP as they do of the Singaporean, South Korean and Japanese economies.

In 2007, Singapore’s exports totaled $450.6 billion; South Korea $371.5 bn; Taiwan $246.7 bn; Malaysia $181.2 bn; Thailand $151.0 bn; Indonesia $118.0 bn; the Philippines a pathetic $49.3 bn. Don’t look behind, but Vietnam is fast catching up with $48.1 bn. In all likelihood, Vietnam overtook the Philippines in exports in 2008 since it draws about eight times more direct foreign investments, mostly in manufacturing, than the Philippines.

The metaphor that I use to describe the economic situation in East Asia in 2008-09 is: an Intensity IX hit our neighborhood. Those of our neighbors who prospered from the export of manufactured goods – meaning practically everyone – saw their skyscrapers crack or collapse from the tremor. The Philippines survived with only a scratch because it had managed to build only a three-storey walk-up and therefore had a lower center of gravity, not because it was inherently a stronger building. It is a consuelo de bobo, not something to boast about

President Arroyo also boasted that in the last four years (2005 to 2008?), tourist arrivals almost doubled. This is not quite accurate. In 2008, we registered 3.2 million arrivals. Is she saying that in 2005 we had only 1.6 or 1.8 million tourist arrivals? Not true. In 2001, we already had 2.2 million tourists. So the number of tourist arrivals did NOT double or almost double in four years..

More apropos to this discussion is that in 2008, Hong Kong drew 26 million tourists, Malaysia 16 million, Thailand 13 million. In 1991, the Philippines and Indonesia drew almost exactly the same number of tourists: one million. In 2008, Indonesia was drawing in more than six million, while the Philippines was still struggling with 3.2 million. More ominously, Vietnam overtook the Philippines last year with 4.2 million, while tiny Cambodia is fast catching up with us, with 2.0 million.

In her SONA, President Arroyo boasted that we have the highest level ever of gross international reserves and that her government created eight million jobs since 2001. Yes but the record level of our foreign exchange reserves owes more to the remittances of overseas Filipino workers to their families here (now reaching $16 billion a year) than to substantial increases in dollar earnings of our exports and tourism sectors, which are actually the laggards in this part of the world. (See above)

As for eight million jobs that she claims to have created here, that seems to include sidewalk vendors, GROs in girlie bars, pirated DVD entrepreneurs, and fixers in government offices. More telling would be the hard reality that more than eight million Filipinos have been forced to go abroad to get the jobs that they could not find in the domestic economy.

Actually this diaspora started during the Marcos years and continued under Aquino,. Ramos, Estrada and Arroyo, so it is not solely Gloria’s fault. But no one should be proud of this state of affairs, and no one should boast of having created x-number of jobs when y=x-number have been forced to leave and work abroad.

The long and short of it is that the Philippine economy, from the 1970s to 2009, has not created enough jobs for its people because of consistently poor choices in economic strategies and policies by its leaders.. *****

(Next week: the political fall-out from SONA 2009).

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