[ Reactors say... ]
Rep. JR NEREUS ACOSTA 1st District of Bukidnon
I
am happy to be a reactor because this would be timely. Not only because the United Nations just had its General Assembly, particularly on the Millennium Development Goals, but also because I serve as member of the newly-created MDG Committee in Congress. I would like to focus on three or four major points. First, I would like to talk about what Professor Jeffrey Sachs said. He is a foremost economist at Harvard and now Director of the Earth Institute at the Columbia University, and author of the recent book How to End Poverty. You can access websites on his work. Anyway, I had the rare privilege of meeting Dr. Sachs in October 2005, when I was World Fellow of Yale University. At that meeting, I asked Professor Sachs a question about his comment on the Medium Term Development Plan of the Philippines. The government had crowed about the fact that Prof. Sachs gave the MTPDP a thumbs-up, and there was much brouhaha in the media about how wonderful this MTPDP was, as praised by Sachs. I said, but those qualifiers were obviously left out and not mentioned by Secretary Bunye or President Arroyo. We Filipinos do make good plans. We make wonderful reports and excellent Power Point presentations. Yet it is the Vietnamese, the Thais, the Malaysians who listen to us — as we Filipinos have the gift of gab – and who return to their countries, after listening quietly, and implement what we Filipinos have planned. And (what happens to) We plan and plan but don’t execute. It is the same with Congress, right? In a lot of ways. That is why my friends in the academe continue to quip: the opposite of pro is con. The opposite of Progress is Congress! Jeffrey Sachs said three qualifiers. Three things that government must do to realize, enforce and actually make these beautifully laid-out plans — MDGs included — workable, enforceable, feasible. First, we must fix the fiscal health of the country. Both classes of Professor Briones on financial management and fiscal administration will agree with that. We have a deficit now that is a quarter of the actual budget. In the trillion-peso budget now, all sectors are on a decline: social services, economic interventions, etc. The only one that has risen is debt servicing and that is just for the interest payments because the DBM does not include principal payments. And so if you look at the debt stock, the actual sum or whole of what we really owe — contingent liabilities, official development assistance, etc. the state of Transco, Napocor, GOCCs, the evaluation of funding sources, my goodness, no one really knows what we owe. We have to ask this government and really delve
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Moving Forward with the Millennium Development Goals: MAY PERA PA BA?
into this budget. So that is the first thing Sachs said. The second: population and human development. Sachs said that you cannot possibly look at meeting the targets for MDGs with a 2.36 percent population growth rate. I know this is a source of acrimonious debate and we are engaged in this as the Philippine Legislators Committee on Population and Development, which I chair. We have to reduce this birth rate. And third: “You have to get governance right.” And when you say governance, you necessarily mean corruption. You’re talking about 40 cents of every dollar going to waste, or inefficiently used. Those are World Bank estimates. Perhaps it is even more but that’s on average. Now there is a slide in Dr. Villaverde’s presentation that said that, I think it was primarily on the budget cap. And then there was something said about LGUs, that they cannot track LGU spending on health, for instance. You know that in essence even if you have health budgets and finances, you’re not really sure because there are many mayors who are just keeping the medicines and stocking them in their house, or using these for politics and campaigns. That is as far as health is concerned. We’re not talking yet about education. Of course Undersecretary Bacani knows this all too well — supplies, books, textbooks, etc. That’s my first set of general reactions. Let’s get to the GAA of 2006. I don’t know where to examine the rate of progress of the MDGs. In this brochure on the MDGs you handed out there is the column of probability of attaining the different targets — high, high, high, medium, medium, high, high, high. medium high, medium ,high .... Wow. That’s very optimistic! Of course, the source of these targets is the Medium Term Development Plan. Is there anyone in government, in academe, in civil society, and the social worker at large who actually believes that money will go to MDG? And that we will achieve these targets? We can just leave that to the open forum. But for the GAA, I know for instance we just had the budget analysis with former Secretary Emilia Boncodin. And among others, she asked us to look into carefully lumped sums like a so-called “healing” fund which would be for the Armed Forces worth P48.6 billion. That’s a lump sum supposedly to heal the wounds of EDSA 1, 2 and 3, the wounds of this country! Good grief. I don’t know what kind of treatment that will entail. P48.6 billion, we’re not sure of the accounting and the auditing mechanism that will be devised. There’s going to be a P29-billion fund for the AFP retirement allowances and unfortunately General Gudani would probably not have his share of this P29-billion retirement allowances. There is a 5 billion Kilos-Asenso in the DILG for different local government