It’s still all press releases so far

If press releases and public posturing can solve our fiscal crisis, there should be nothing more to worry about. Unfortunately, the real world demands sincerity, credibility and hard work. The latest of these PR gimmicks is asking the country’s rich to donate a million each. That’s pure showbiz that will not help our dire condition. Stunts like this make our country look stupid.

Yet, we don’t even realize our predicament. Our politicians have been trying to do a Houdini, entertaining us with wild promises about the pork barrel, for instance. Now you see it, now you don’t. As senators and congressmen line up to announce they are forsaking their pork, Budget Secretary Emilia Boncodin and some congressmen were forced to admit that the pork remains hidden in the budget proposal sent by the Palace to Congress.

Batangas Rep. Hermenegildo Mandanas told ANC that those who say the pork is gone are either ill-informed or trying to misinform. In any case, the legislators say, the problem is not in the pork but in how the administration manages the country’s finances.

They pointed out the scandalous practice of allowing government corporations to borrow their heads off, lose a lot of money and let the National Treasury cover their deficiencies. That is tantamount to spending government funds without Congressional appropriation. That’s unconstitutional. They should pass a law putting GOCCs on a short leash from now on.

We have to admit the legislators have a point. The extremely large obligation passed on to the National Treasury by Napocor would have been caught earlier or at least debated upon, if Congress had a say in Napocor’s budget.

Money lost by Napocor, NFA and the National Electrification Administration is legendary. I do not understand why our legislators never bothered to investigate them in the past. Clear dereliction of duty, if you ask me. If NFA must subsidize rice, Congress must appropriate funds rather than allow NFA to contract commercial loans they cannot pay.

What I do not understand is the money supposedly lost by PNOC. That is one GOCC that should be spinning money. I realize they don’t get 100 percent of Petron’s profits anymore but their geothermal fields and their Malampaya interest should keep PNOC in the black. I suspect, the politicians who were placed on top of PNOC and its subsidiaries must have mismanaged the funds so badly for the company to join the ranks of tax-eating GOCCs. This should be investigated not just by Congress but by the Ombudsman. This should teach Ate Glo not to use GOCC positions for political payback.

And so the political badminton season continues with the country not a step closer to really addressing the fiscal crisis. There is still no sincerity and no credibility among our leaders. Talk is cheap and that‚s all we are getting so far. Press releases are more entertaining than informative.

Two weeks after Ate Glo’s admission and we simply haven’t moved, outside of the symbolic stuff. And even here, none of the stuff that would really hurt the high and mighty, like getting rid of gas guzzling SUVs. I have some gas saving tips: Only the President is entitled to motorcycle escorts... Cabinet members should have only one back up car, if at all... and no Cabinet member can use a SUV.

I think the ball is still in Ate Glo’s court. Admitting we are in a crisis is good as a first step. But she has not explained how we got there. It should be interesting to hear our economist President explain the causes of this crisis in a very professional manner. If she does, she will have to confess her own sins, all those populist decisions she made on the altar of re-election. Napocor is one. The Senate, if their effort to investigate is any good, will find out her role in the creating the crisis anyway. Why not beat the Senate to the draw and confess now?

Then she must, in the words of Tony Abaya, apologize, not just for her sins as I pointed out but also for being such a hypocrite in her call for austerity. "We are supposed to be impressed," Abaya, a columnist who supported her candidacy for sheer pragmatism, wrote in the Free Press, "that Malacanang is suddenly on a cost-cutting binge and did not even serve merienda to leaders of Congress and members of the Cabinet when they met for a two-hour conference last August 24."

But, Abaya asked, where was she "when her husband Mike Arroyo celebrated his natal day last June 26 with a birthday bash in Malacanang in which 1,700 invited guests feasted and drank and danced up to three in the morning? At a conservative P1,000 per head, that party must have cost at least P1.7 million, excluding bands and drinks. How many malnourished children could that have fed for six months?"

Credibility. That’s what she and our bunch of cabinet officials and members of Congress do not have. Unfortunately, crisis leadership demands credibility as a basic quality for success. I have said this more than once before but our leaders have chosen to ignore it, to our peril. They make themselves believe the lie that any criticism they don’t like must be politically motivated.

Well, here‚s one more columnist who is saying the same thing and unlike me, he was pragmatic enough to shift his support to Ate Glo when it was clear that Raul Roco was not going to make it. Tony Abaya actually likes Ate Glo and has not complained as much as I have about her kind of leadership. Yet, this is what he wrote a week ago.

"A leader is credible only when she leads by example, when she practices what she preaches. That leader loses that credibility when there is a yawning gap between what she says and what she does. That leader can regain credibility if she humbly apologizes and begs for forgiveness when she makes a mistake. That leader cannot regain credibility if she is arrogant and refuses to admit that mistake or apologize for it."

Will Ate Glo be humble enough to apologize for her willful mistakes that brought us to this crisis? (Actually, Tony thinks FVR should apologize too). Confession is the first step to salvation. For so long as she and her spin masters refuse to acknowledge this administration’s mistakes, people will suspect a cover up and congressional committees will regale the media with supposed "discoveries" of failures. That will dissipate our energy that should be devoted to the task of rebuilding this nation’s finances.

There are no easy and painless solutions. Our leaders should at least have a clear idea of where we went wrong so we can change course and future generations will be spared our anguish. We don’t even have that.

Debt Relief

Other than the Napocor question, the current crisis should also open the door to the other difficult question: debt relief. Argentina is forcing the issue on its creditors. Truth to tell, banks have to bear some responsibility for this debt crisis, Argentina and ours.

There is this commentary by Philip Bowring in the International Herald Tribune the other day that "the Philippines needs a real financial crisis, and the earlier the better." And you know why? It is the only way to bring "Philippine politicians and international lenders to their senses, a much worse one awaits."

A financial crisis here would produce "major global reverberations from default by a major borrower that has been under the wing of the International Monetary Fund for so long. It would be another reminder of how little the international financial architecture has been reformed since the Asian and Argentine financial crises."

It is time to talk to our creditors not to repudiate our debts but to get them to see that it is in their interest to give us some slack. IMF should encourage the banks to talk to us and see what could be done to reduce our burden in the short term. They don’t want another Argentina on their hands. Argentina has refused to even sit on a negotiating table with its creditors and there is nothing the IMF could do to make them.

Baby Geek

Here’s Dr. Ernie E.

SON: Daddy, how was I born?

DAD: Ah, very well, my son. One day you need to find out anyway! Your mom and I got together in a chat room. I set up a date via e-mail with your mom and we met at a cyber café. We snuck into a secluded room, and then your mother downloaded from my memory stick. As soon as I was ready for an upload, it was discovered that neither one of us had used a firewall. Since it was too late to hit the delete button, nine months later the blessed virus, um baby, appeared.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]