Leadership vacuum

It is painful to watch our country commit hara kiri before our eyes. While still in a state of emergency over COVID’s devastating impact on our lives, an abundance of bureaucratic stupidity is reported almost daily.

Idiotic thinking made some DENR people get white crushed dolomite sand from Cebu to beautify the Manila Bay shoreline. As it turns out, the dolomite sand can cause respiratory issues, eye irritation and other health hazards, according to the health department.

Since DENR exempted itself from doing an environmental impact study, they didn’t get to hear DOH warn about their plan.

The project is expected to cost about P400 million, an insensitive use of tax money in the light of our economic woes from COVID.

Even the DepEd Secretary thinks the white sand budget could have been used more productively to buy digital equipment for distance learning.

Then the bureaucrats at MTRCB want to censor Netflix. That wins a gold medal for stupidity.

Sen. Grace Poe, a former head of MTRCB, said it can’t be done. With Netflix’s thousands of shows, we don’t have the manpower to view, classify or censor all.

Trying to censor Netflix and other video streaming options on the net will require something like the great firewall of China and we don’t want that. We will just end up using VPNs or virtual private networks to go around the firewall, as we do when in China. It just increases the cost to the consumer, with no benefit to society.

More importantly, the concept is totally wrong… censorship’s days are over. Abolishing MTRCB is the better thing to do… saves money for the taxpayers for a useless office.

But those are small potatoes. The major one is how we are still continuing to go aimlessly around the need to effectively manage the pandemic.

Thailand just celebrated 100 days of no new community infection of the COVID virus. We are still having at least one to two thousand new cases daily.

The blog Heneral Lunacy describes our situation well: we are “an investment grade economy with starving millions, a nation literally bleeding to death from corruption.”

The latest review of the ratings agency Moodys agrees. Moodys retained our investment grade credit profile, which it said “has been characterized in recent years by strong economic performance, a strengthening fiscal position and limited vulnerability to external shocks…”

And here is the “but”: “the global coronavirus outbreak will disrupt or potentially reverse these trends. Structural credit challenges include low per capita income and some constraints to the quality of institutions, which stands in contrast to strong policy effectiveness.”

Here are our credit strengths, according to Moodys: robust growth potential supported by favorable demographics; moderate government debt levels, improved debt affordability owing in part to revenue reform; stable and resilient banking system.

Here are the credit challenges: low per capita incomes compared to investment-grade peers; weak rule of law and control of corruption weighing on institutional capacity and exposure to climate change and natural disaster risks.

The New York-based think tank Global Source observed:

“In its fight against COVID-19, the Philippines is handicapped by weak public health institutions and what appears to be a leadership vacuum.” Global Source added the government’s handling of the health crisis, which exposed long-standing institutional flaws, was “quite concerning.”

They are right. The President is unable to get a competent alter ego to manage the health crisis in the same way that he has been able to delegate management of the economy to his able economic managers headed by the Finance Secretary.

No matter how good the economic team is, Global Source thinks the government’s projected V-shaped recovery – or a strong recovery after a steep decline – in 2021 is unachievable due to shocks to demand and supply alongside massive unemployment, business disruptions and regulatory and political uncertainties.

Heneral Lunacy laments that “70 million Filipinos are near famine, 30 million are out of real work and all because we are held hostage by the lying and cheating government officials sitting in air-conditioned rooms sucking up to the President.”

Corruption and COVID are the same, Heneral Lunacy asserts. “Both are not living organisms. Both come alive only when in contact with human cells. Both are infectious. If left unchecked – and both are unchecked – they transmit to others until the body and the body politic become so swollen with the disease they cannot breathe.

“Government officials steal because they can and because the worse that can happen is a slap on the wrist, a wink and a nod, millions in their pockets and a job reference.

“And we can only sit and watch as these vultures go through our national belongings with impunity. Where is the call to arms we were promised on inaugural day?”

This leadership vacuum left us, Heneral Lunacy says, with millions who “will go from unemployed to unemployable. The inequality in education will result in four million kids not making it to school and some 20 million receiving a dismal version of a system that ranks us last, and second to last worldwide in comprehension, reading and math.”

I think the credit rating agencies are starting to see that no matter how great our economic and financial management may be, worsening political risk is our greatest problem. Conversations about RevGov and the presidential demeanor during his television appearances all contribute to a worsening political risk assessment.

In other words, we could lose all the advantages we have for having good economic fundamentals simply by mismanaging the country’s governance.

My friend John Mangun in Business Mirror says it all:

“A nation’s economy is built upon confidence and then it moves in anticipation of events that often may never even happen in the future. ‘Fundamentals’ are what you have done for me yesterday and maybe today.

“‘Confidence’ is what I think you are going to do for me in the future. Positive confidence in the future is going to determine what actions we take today.”

Forget our good economic fundamentals. That’s past, tainted by COVID. Stop this epidemic of bureaucratic stupidity to build confidence in the future.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco