'The ideal SONA'

The State of the Nation Address (SONA) is a major occasion when the president has the eyes and ears of the nation all to himself in one shining moment. It is a grand moment for his to take and use. As in a ballgame, the president has the ball and directs it on how to get to the goal. Unfortunately, the ball is also his to fumble.

Any good speech can, and should, be armed with numbers and analyses of the broad sweep. But the SONA’s most important component is the vision. The SONA is not only about the state of the present but about what can be done about the future. The country needs to know where it is headed and how that will be achieved. This route is more than just fighting corruption and improving governance. It must provide direction for that governance.

“The ideal SONA.” The ideal SONA tells about the president’s perceptions about the problems that the country faces and the way out of those problems. He spells out the resources he intends to use, how to allocate them and how to raise them to achieve what needs to be achieved as the nation moves forward.

The good SONA also has to have an analysis of the problems so that the nation understands governmental thinking on how it is approaching those problems. This means that goals and yardsticks must be stated so that forward movement is properly measured. A proper yardstick is needed. It can’t just be because the president says so.

Just as important, the SONA is a signaling device to the outside world. In an open economy, those who look for good opportunities for investments and new and expanded economic relations have their listening outposts awaiting signals for action. These are the foreign investors – those already in place and those who are on the outside waiting to see what could be in store. In short, the SONA is a great communicator of economic intelligence about the country’s future and its leadership.

A good SONA has essentially three parts: enumeration of problems, analysis of how and why those problems need to be solved, and an explanation of how the government will solve them. The last could, by its nature, guide the listener to the vision of what is to come. Some of these incidentally are in the realm of the economic and social future: quantifying problems, raising resources to attack them, and showing how those resources are used to attain the good objectives.

“The good part.” The first part of President Aquino’s SONA is quite good. He begins with the enumeration of concrete achievements. He mentions the anti-corruption fight, the first year achievements – credit upgrades, stock market upswing that forebodes confidence, and the outcomes of economic management with positive results. But he stops there as if the economic future is self-executing. He then proceeds to the focus – on governance.

The idea that abuse of wealth or power is common in our society through the practice of utak wang-wang was presented with effect. Utak wangwang is the state of mind that the powerful and influential abuse to get away with anything in society. Utak wangwang is the mentality that led to corrupt ways. And the president intends to slay it. Thus he set about exposing the bad examples that have surfaced through recent investigations.

This message resonates at street level. It is the type of rhetoric that he delivers in the vernacular to great effect to the common listener. Some line of this speech is directed at the previous president and is political sniping to some extent.

But for the fight against corruption in society to succeed, convictions have to result. The announcement of a new Ombudsman accentuates that the fight continues and determined direction might be on the way. In the end, however, only convictions will produce the full accountability that corruption does not pay.

Will these be realized? Is this only political posturing? None of the fight against corruption in the time of the first Aquino presidency produced any conviction of the big cases. Hopefully, history does not repeat itself.

“The missing parts: (1) The whys and wherefores….” Two major elements of a good SONA are missing in this one. The first is the analysis of why the government is doing certain types of programs. Asserting statistics is a common enough sin of SONAs – and most presidents have used their SONA moments to regale in numbers achievements.

But the general public needs to be given the opportunity of an explanation. When some programs are larger than others, the public must know the reasons. The claim that 1.6 million families are recipients of CCTs – the conditional cash transfers – is the occasion to explain the raison d’etre for those programs to help poor families. It is not only to alleviate hunger but it goes beyond that.

The CCTs are useful only when declared to be part of a huge economic reform program with the objective of eventually weaning the poor from dependence on government dole outs. Otherwise, we are simply explaining a dole-out program that has no end in sight. Or it is adopting a program that is not sustainable unless the government achieves major productivity gains in new income and output growth. Only economic reform produces that new growth in productivity. Where is the road map toward getting it done?

The ultimate goal of the CCTs is to help people to become productive citizens and not state wards. In this way they become assets rather than liabilities of society. Explaining how this dovetails with the vision of the future is important. After all, the CCT resources given out have their costs in terms of physical school classrooms or new irrigation systems given up.

“The missing parts: (2) Where is the vision, the reform program?” The most disappointing part in the 2011 SONA is the absence of the vision and the statement of the reforms that the nation needs to fulfill. The president mentioned a few items – but the disdain for details led him to skip the most important part. He did not even give a hint of that vision or give the nation a skeleton of its structure. The economic program or the social program did not enter the center stage. The legislative program is little mentioned. There was no reference to the development plan or the contents of the major elements that he wishes to pursue in it.

By omission, the president missed an important occasion to tell the nation where he wants us go. Thus, in failing to do this, he dropped the ball during a most important occasion of his presidency.

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