Duterte’s SONA, the great reveal

President Rodrigo Duterte’s third State of the Nation Address did not only lack his signature hubris and crassness, more importantly, it is devoid of the much-awaited realization of his campaign promise for salary increase of teachers and other government employees. As such, it was a great reveal for hundreds of thousands of public school teachers nationwide. Now, it is clearer, his previous pronouncements of salary increase are just that, fake promises.

Essentially, Duterte’s SONA lack anything that truly matters to the daily lives of the common folk. There is no mention of the grave economic crisis and how it shall be resolved. He even denied the role of the TRAIN Law in the steep inflation that has eroded the purchasing power of the working people’s income. His rhetoric of giving decent and comfortable lives to Filipinos are not supported by sound economic reforms that shall improve the lives of the people immediately and in the long term.

While he has broken a lot of his campaign promises before such as ending ‘ENDO,’ resolving the problems of traffic and criminality, stopping the K-12 program and pursuing peace talks, the teachers intently listened to his last SONA, wishing that somehow, the president would remember. Anyway, he has done it for the uniformed personnel last year. But the president did not even spare a second for the matter. All the more disappointing to teachers, but so much the better.

Now, the teachers know that the present administration is no better than its predecessors. We are reminded of the great lesson in our history of struggle for our rights --we cannot just place our hopes on the powers-that-be. Polite restraint and endless waiting will bear no fruit for our cry for relief. Victory is won through collective action.

The SONA also heralds the deliberations for the national budget. As expected, the Duterte administration’s proposal excluded our most legitimate demands. It did not cover substantial salary increase. No sufficient budget was proposed to fund our Magna Carta benefits that have been enacted since 1966. The computation for Maintenance and Other Operating Expenses did not take into consideration the items that teachers and parents cover just to make schools operational. Substantial budget for the creation of items for education support personnel to alleviate teachers from non-teaching duties is now nowhere to be found. No sufficient budget was allotted to regularize thousands of contractual employees and mentors who shall fall prey to agency-hiring come January 2019.

Such kind of budget is unacceptable to teachers. We now gear our energies towards relentless mass actions from our schools to the streets and up to the gates of Congress to champion the interests of the education sector. We put it upon ourselves to rally for full state subsidy for free quality education and assert the dignity of the teaching profession.

Benjamin Valbuena

Alliance of Concerned Teachers