The British people are very long on tradition, and even today, in public places like parks, the age old practice is for street lamps to be lit every evening by a lamplighter who turns on the lamps with a pole and then proclaims “It’s 6 o’clock and all is well.”
As the administration of BS Aquino III goes into its evening and the nation’s lamps are being lit, can it be said that in this country “all is well”? Let’s do a tour of the national horizon and see.
The nation has just gone through another filing-of-certificates-of-candidacy exercise, and that exercise has produced certificates filed by several dozen candidates for the Presidency of the Republic (of which four can be considered serious), the Vice Presidency (of which perhaps 10 can be considered serious) and membership in the Senate (of which perhaps 50 can be regarded as reasonably serious). The best that can be said about the candidacies of the principal Presidential candidates is that they are not heart-stopping; the worst that can be said is that they are provocative of the question “Are they all that we’ve got?”
Overall, it can be said that all is well with the Philippine economy. But if one did not wish to discuss the nation’s economic health in broad-strokes fashion, one would have to advert to the non-inclusiveness of the GDP (gross domestic product) surge that this country has been experiencing in recent years, the continued high incidence of extreme or near-extreme poverty, the government’s persistent inability to get really serious about public spending on infrastructure and an Executive attitude toward corruption that has forced the Office of the Ombudsman to take on the role of dragon-slayer.
Other than that, a lamplighter lighting up the nation’s lamps at sundown these days would be able to say that all was well in this country.
And in what kind of mood are (1) the Filipino people and (2) the foreign business community after having witnessed the COC filing spectacle and appraised the lists of candidates for national office, especially the candidates for the Presidency? The Filipino people, from my observation, are in a mood of resignation mixed with frustration in the face of a forced choice between individuals who either have been non-performing or are demonstrably corrupt or lack experience or have displayed erraticism in their public careers. The foreign business community, on the other hand, have become familiar with the candidates concerned, have been watching the present situation unfold and are maintaining an “I’ll believe it when I see it” posture.
Given the style shown by the Department of Budget and Management in the management and deployment of public funds during the last five-and-a-half years—by turns devious and overcautious—it is little wonder that analysts of Philippine economic performance after the 2016 election have not been laying as much stress as in the past on the electoral impact of stepped-up public spending. This time around, they are placing more faith on the basic strength of the Philippine economy and less on the budget management capabilities of Florencio Abad and Co.
That about sums up the condition of the Philippine ship of state and the mood of the Filipino people as they troop to the cemeteries and memorial parks and ponder the question whether the loved ones lying there are or are not now in a better place.
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