Time to restart our failed economy

I have no doubt that President Rodrigo Duterte has delivered his 5th State of the Nation Address (SONA) either at the Batasan Pambansa complex before a joint session of Congress at 2 p.m. or, as Presidential Communications Secretary Martin Andanar pointed out the other day, that the President could have switched to “Plan B” and delivered his SONA inside Malacañang rather than the Batasan Pambansa if many of the invited guests at Batasan tested positive for COVID-19.

In the meantime, as I told you in my column yesterday, I don’t think I would be able to catch my deadline while waiting for the President’s SONA. This means we will have to continue with this column and talk about the SONA in tomorrow’s column. So we can only hope that the President would bare the government’s recovery plan as the Philippines is facing a health crisis and economic instability. The Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) has spent the last four months on various lockdown schemes, making us in Cebu City the world’s longest lockdown city.

We can only wish that President Duterte’s SONA would focus on the recovery of our failed economy. After all, the IATF spent a full four months putting many places under lockdown, yet I already chastised them for not copying the best practices we can see happening with our Asian neighbors like Taiwan or Vietnam. Taiwan has shown its willingness to help the Philippines when we had a Zoom interview Taiwan’s Vice President Chen Chien-jen two months ago. But then the IATF had its own ways, sometimes offering ridiculous reasons, like allowing the Catholic churches to open with only 10 people allowed.

Of course, I expect that the President’s SONA would mean to come up with plans to help the beleaguered Filipino people. We know that the President remains determined to improve the lives of Filipinos by consistently pushing for development in all parts of the country and by continuously aiming to bring government services closer to the people.

However, this global pandemic has done something that no President ever had before. It is the return of thousands of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) back home to the Philippines. OFWs were once hailed as our new heroes. However, in just a few months, their titles have dramatically changed to locally stranded individuals (LSI). I just saw on Facebook thousands of LSIs stranded at the Rizal Memorial Stadium awaiting transportation home. Some of them are OFWs who have returned from their host countries but were not allowed by the governors in their respective provinces to return home until they undergo a 14-day quarantine.

I can understand why governors like Gov. Gwen F. Garcia of Cebu or Gov. Zaldy Villa of Siquijor are so strict in implementing the rules on LSIs because no one knows if they have been infected by Covid-19 in their host countries. A good example is Saudi Arabia where a hundred Filipino workers supposedly died due to Covid-19 infections. The Philippine government could not bring home those dead bodies as the protocol for dead persons due to Covid-19 is to be cremated. But since there is no cremation in Saudi, the Saudi government had to bury those poor Filipinos in the desert.

At this point, I most certainly hope that the SONA of President Duterte would focus on restarting our ill-fated economy. Don’t forget that not only are many shops and stores shut down, many of our people are jobless and need a job very soon or they go hungry. What is worse is the reality that those jobless workers now have to fight for those jobs with OFWs who also need to find a job here at home. The presence of OFWs here at home is very disastrous for the Philippine government because it means that they have nothing to remit to the Philippine Treasury for the year 2020.

So in the meantime, the IATF must simply ensure that the Filipino people follow the protocols, which are to wear masks, do social distancing, and wash hands thoroughly. If most of our people would follow these protocols, then we can sort of limit the number of people infected with Covid-19. The rest we give it up to our Lord Jesus Christ to help our beleaguered nation.

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