Wider opportunities beginning July 2022
There is very little doubt that the latest Pulse Asia survey results speak as many volumes about the Duterte administration’s kind of political and economic governance as the opportunities for the incoming administration beginning July 2022.
The space for rectifying the serious slippages in handling the health pandemic and managing the efforts for economic recovery has been reduced to an iota, less than eight months before the May 2022 election and barely nine months before the turnover in June 2022. The Administration picked many battles on so many fronts that it lost the focus required of competent and compassionate leadership. We thought the President burned the ships so that there would be no turning back when he ordered our health authorities to keep the lockdowns unless we contain the pandemic spread to allow business activities to resume. We thought our handling of the health crisis would be strengthened. More vaccine rollout would just be like the icing on the cake. We were wrong.
Some quarters might question our assessment of how the pandemic was managed by our authorities. They wonder how the gorilla in the room could be ignored when the health protocols are constantly sharpened; our testing, tracing and isolating facilities strengthened; more vaccines are being administered; and funding for our pandemic response continues to be secured both by our finance and treasury officials.
Putting it as “ignoring the gorilla in the room” was actually being charitable.
Awarding contracts worth billions of pesos to favored, undercapitalized companies with no track record with the government which delivered overpriced, damaged, and expired health protective gears was not exactly ignoring the gorilla. It is burying the gorilla. Earlier, before the pandemic surged in the Philippines, we needed to restrict international travel in February 2020, but we wavered because that could alienate our foreign visitors. We negotiated early for the supply of US-made vaccines, but we dropped the ball for it took us ages to prepare the documents for reasons only our health authorities knew. We adopted alphabet type of community quarantines with no predictable basis for migrating from one alphabet to another alphabet of a lockdown.
As a result, in the last one year and a half, we had to face the twin crises of health pandemic and economic recession, made worse by bad governance and dissipated energy fighting many other battles. The President also decided to disallow his cabinet from attending the Senate probe on Pharmally. He owes it to the Filipino people to get to the bottom of this anomaly so he should be the first one to show the way to greater transparency and accountability. There is room for encouraging his appointees to cooperate with the Upper House, rather than emboldening them with his protection against any possible Senate contempt and arrest. A constitutional crisis might be triggered in defense of a small private company.
It would be worthwhile for the President to devote his limited time to the big picture of state craft. He can also tweak the composition of the IATF (Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases) in favor of more medical practitioners, virologists, epidemiologists, and other competent and experienced professionals. If we should co-exist with the virus, having solid database of information about the dynamics of the pandemic to guide both health and economic policies is fundamental.
We are seeing the consequences of a defocused leadership.
The Duterte Administration’s five strongest areas way back in September 2020 were fighting criminality with an approval of 88% of the respondents, followed by both the grant of assistance to those affected by the pandemic and controlling the spread of the virus, 84%; responding to the needs of areas affected by calamities, 82%; and promoting peace, 81%.
What is revealing is that through the next 12 months, with reckoning in November 2020, February 2021, June 2021, and lately, September 2021, the performance of the Administration has consistently dropped in all the 14 areas of governance. Between June 2021 and September 2021, a short three-month period, the decline was a multiple of what we could see between September 2020 and June 2021, a longer nine-month period.
After a year, the ranking of the Administration’s approval rating changed. Still on top was fighting criminality, down from 88% to 74%; responsiveness to calamities, down from 82% to 71%; welfare protection of overseas workers, down from 79% to 66%; and both in fourth, keeping peace and extending assistance to those affected by the pandemic from 81% and 84% to 64%, respectively.
In which areas did the Administration score the lowest approval rating?
The lowest scores were seen in eight areas but we could group them into governance of the economy, territoriality, graft and corruption, environment and health.
With the lowest approval, economic governance includes inflation control, poverty reduction, workers’ pay adjustments and job creation. Within this group, inflation control was lowest, dropping from 63% to only 37%, or the biggest decline of 26 percentage points (ppts). The other areas declined by a high of 25 ppts for workers’ pay adjustments and a low of 23 ppts for job creation.
For the rest, the Administration’s handling of territorial disputes was considered second lowest, with a setback from 65% to only 49% or 16 ppts reduction. Third lowest was fighting graft and corruption with a lower approval rating by 25 ppts, or from 77% to 52%. The environment was next, down from 75% to 56% or 19 ppts. Pandemic management, at first rather reasonably high with a score of 84% a year ago, suffered a big decline of 25 ppts to only 59%.
These areas of governance could easily populate the agenda of the next Administration because based on the experts’ assessment and those of the international financial institutions, we are bound to continue struggling against the pandemic and its economic consequences for at least a couple of years. In the estimate of National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA), “it may take 10 years to catch up to pre-COVID-19 trajectory” in terms of financial investments.
This Administration’s major weaknesses could very well be the next Administration’s operations manual on how not to govern. The reciprocal of lower approval is higher disapproval.
For instance, we see that the declining approval rating of the Government is very much reflected in the latest Nikkei COVID-19 Recovery Index which ranks 121 countries and regions on pandemic management, vaccines rollout, and social mobility at the end of each month. The higher the score and ranking, the closer is each country to recovery. This indicates low confirmed cases, better vaccine administration, and easier social distancing metrics.
For September 2021, the Philippines ranked the lowest at 121st, with a score of 30.5%, topped by higher ranking Laos, Gabon, Vietnam, and Barbados. Best recovering states are first, Malta with a score of 73%; second, Chile and Bahrain with identical score of 72%; and third, the UAE, 71%.
What is appalling is that the ranking of the Philippines actually deteriorated from its August 120th rank, topping only Vietnam’s 121st. Even if the country’s score of 26% in August improved to 30.5%, low-scoring Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, and Sri Lanka managed to upgrade their performance by more significant margins.
While the next Administration should build on the exemplary showing of our athletes in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, it is more important to improve on our performance in health, political and economic governance in this nation of 110 million Filipinos.
There is no need to build more doors of opportunities. We only have to open them wider for our country and our people.
Diwa C. Guinigundo is the former deputy governor for the Monetary and Economics Sector, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP). He served the BSP for 41 years. In 2001-2003, he was alternate executive director at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC. He is the senior pastor of the Fullness of Christ International Ministries in Mandaluyong.
