$1:P63.06

Our currency is depreciating faster than the President’s job approval ratings are declining. The two are not unrelated.

The Palace mouthpiece blames the pesos spectacular fall on the crisis in the Middle East, the impact of El Niño on our agriculture and something she calls “political noise.” She forgot to mention the more important factors, principally the appalling failure of economic statesmanship.

President Marcos Jr. was last heard instructing the people to buy water pails. The sales of plastic pails hardly improved. Our citizens thought this had to be a joke.

To prevent this from completely landing as pure comedy, Marcos Jr.’s enablers quickly put together a show where dirty water was filtered and drank right before our eyes. Scientists warned against doing this. No one bothered with the fact that when drought happens, it is because there is no rain. Therefore, there will be no rainwater to collect. Our best pails will still be empty.

This remark about buying water pails is just the latest of mind-boggling things coming from the President’s mouth. Last month, he brushed away concerns about the country’s mounting debt by saying the borrowings were just meaningless numbers floating in the air.

To economists, however, the national debt is an important factor explaining why the peso is collapsing. Our indebtedness has gone significantly past the prudential 60 percent rate. At this level, we cannot borrow without agreeing to pay higher and unsustainable interest rates.

Our balance of payments picture is deteriorating. We are importing our rice and exporting nothing in particular. Consequently, our gross international reserves are shrinking. We now do not have enough to cover eight months worth of imports. Those who sell us stuff will want to be paid in cash.

In the bad old days, we shrugged our shoulders and argued our economic fundamentals are strong. We can no longer do that. We now have the slowest growing economy in East Asia and the highest inflation rate among APEC countries.

Should the peso continue declining, we will need more pesos to pay for every dollar we owe. That is a curse. Our people will have to work more to service the debt. Our wages will fall behind real prices. The SWS survey on involuntary hunger shows it has risen to 22 percent of the population. Poverty and malnutrition looms.

As this happens, there is yet no marked improvement in our agricultural productivity. We will continue to import more food – and thus continue to drain our foreign currency reserves. The vicious cycle further erodes the peso.

Inflation is an undeclared tax on our people. It cuts their purchasing power and magnifies their misery.

The depreciation of the peso is just another measure of that erosion.

Evidentiary gap

The administration propaganda machine tries to smear Davao City by tracing every wrongdoing back to the city. The city is portrayed as the hub of infrastructure corruption, prone to flooding and possibly hosting big time drug syndicates.

Sen. Panfilo Lacson, in his personal political war, tries to do the same with Taguig City. He tries to portray the city as a hub of ghost projects and enabler of illegal encroachments into the lake. Lately, he raised the specter of fake land titles held by shoreline communities settled there fro generations.

In both cases, the accusations tend to outrun the evidence.

We have heard all the Davao stories. The Taguig stories run parallel.

After all the accusations he made, Lacson has not produced one fully documented case of looting infrastructure funds. He presented a drone video of reclamation being done but has not identified any person responsible for doing that. While causing anxiety among shoreline communities, he has not produced any faulty land title.

The gap between accusation and evidence seems to widen by the day.

True, any wrongdoing deserves to be exposed. But they need to be exposed responsibly. Accountability does not attach only to the accused. It attaches to the accuser as well.

Like the City Government of Davao, the City Government of Taguig is not taking the accusations lightly. In a strongly worded statement, Taguig reminded the senator that “(t)he fight against corruption must always be a fight for truth – not a contest of accusations.”

No politician, Taguig insists, should be protected from investigation. But neither should any politician be convicted in the court of public opinion by insinuation. This is exactly what the prosecution panel is doing against the Vice President of the Republic at the Senate trial.

Lacson seems to be hoping that by smearing Taguig, he smears his political rival in the Senate. This should not be how it works. The City of Taguig commits itself to investigating any allegation of corruption happening within its boundaries – be it encroachment, ghost projects or fake land titles. But it asks for the evidence to be presented.

The fight against corruption should hold no cows sacred – not Taguig, not Alan Cayetano and certainly not Panfilo Lacson.

The city government commits to open all its records to scrutiny but challenges the accuser to do the same with his own records. It wants all these records examined in detail. If charges are warranted, they should be filed. But the air must be cleared of all insinuations.

There is wise advice in politics to never fight city hall. But this is exactly what Lacson has done.