Phl among Top 10 worsened states

2014 saw the breakdown of the nation.

Criminality reigned. Street murders and holdups rose, as cops only watched. Motorcycle gunmen assassinated even minor targets for a liter of liquor. Cabbies leveled up from shortchanging to robbing passengers at gunpoint. Bizarre new rules discouraged gun licensees from renewing, swelling the volume of loose firearms. Witnesses against the Ampatuan massacrers were liquidated. A peace pact with a Moro separatist faction ignited an old settled and a new fiercer one. Islamist terrorists competed with plain bandits in bombing buses and kidnapping tourists in Mindanao. Even cops engaged in ransom abductions in Luzon. The National Police chief was kept in office despite his televised admission of multimillion-peso wrongs, proving that friendship with one on high does wonders. Bared was how convicts at Muntinlupa City’s national prison live like they’re in nearby posh Ayala Alabang Village — in gated, high-fenced, air-conditioned villas with wide-screen TVs, sauna, jacuzzi, music rooms, generators, private guards and security cameras. Wardens claimed with a straight face that such luxuries, on top of an illegal drug lab and assault rifles, are necessary to reform the life-termers from heinous criminality.

Government services failed. Local units couldn’t rescue or relieve constituents from disaster, while national authorities couldn’t rehabilitate razed communities. Four months after Super Typhoon Yolanda leveled a million homes, government was able to erect an astounding 1,000. Had not NGOs built emergency and permanent shelters and schoolhouses, 175 municipalities still would be helpless. Between disasters 27 million of 100 million Filipinos remained poor, 18 million of them hungry and sick. The Manila port clogged up not with increased trade but administrative ineptness. So-called economic managers deluded themselves in credit rating upgrades-for-sale. Politicos attempted term extensions, instead of preparing the people for ASEAN integration. Net result: more suffering. Corruption’s effect was palpable. National and local officials preoccupy themselves with all sorts of pork barrels and perks, leaving no money for social services. The Supreme Court’s illegalizing of the pork has not deterred them from devising new ones.

Speaking of which, corruption reigned too. At the agriculture department the boss and his National Food Authority henchmen again rigged the bidding for imported rice and overpriced the cargo handling. As in 2013 rice retail prices rose last June ironically right after the dry-season harvest, along with vegetables and pork. The sacking of the NFA gofer begot no relief, as the upright substitute was framed with extortion. Dirty nickel and black sand mines of tax-evading Chinese aliens thrived under the protection of bribed environment officers. Even at the health bureau, doctors procured costly but inefficacious medicines. Indictments for pork barrel plunder halted with only three opposition senators. To this day the probers are mum about the administration counterparts whom the pork fixer exposed. Even the probe of the Vice President’s “hidden wealth” stopped abruptly when his favorite contractor was linked to an “overpriced” administration project. Not to be left out of the kickback frenzy, Comelec crooks are again rigging the bidding for new election machines from Venezuelan Smartmatic. The worst sleaze was in Metro Manila’s railways. Officers of the ruling Liberal Party were given a P685-million maintenance contract to do no service at all. When exposed, the crooks sued the investigative journalists. Breakdowns and accidents halted rail operations almost daily. When the riding public howled, the press secretary told them to go ride the bus. The transport chief could hardly say sorry to train passengers who broke limbs and cut faces from sudden brakes. Rubbing salt to injury, he also announced a fare increase starting New Year’s.

Space is not enough to list down all of 2014’s official misdeeds. Readers underwent worse. Makes us wonder if there’s still government at all, or if we’re already a failed state.

In fact, the 2014 Fragile (formerly Failed) States Index ranks the Philippines fifth among ten whose situations alarmingly worsened from 2013. Rated by Fund for Peace, the country slipped to 52nd, from 59th last year, among countries susceptible to disintegration (see http://library.fundforpeace.org/fsi14-overview).

Social indicators of fragile statehood are:

• Demographic pressures: large-scale suffering from natural disasters, disease, pollution, food scarcity;

• Refugees: communities displaced for long periods by natural disasters and violence, like the Zamboanga City siege;

• Group grievances due to discrimination, powerlessness, ethnic violence;

• Human flight and brain drain, as in the 11 million overseas Filipino workers and seven million emigrants.

Economic indicators:

• Uneven development, as seen in wide income gaps and exclusivist growth;

• Poverty and economic decline, due to government debt, unemployment, low purchasing power, inflation.

Political-military indicators:

• State legitimacy under question due to corruption, ineptitude, political dynasties, rigged elections;

• Declining services, especially of police as shown by criminality, education as shown in illiteracy, water and sanitation, unreliability of roads, infrastructures, and energy, poor health care, telecommunications;

• Human rights and rule of law: Human trafficking, curtailed civil liberties and press freedom, remnant political prisons, torture, summary executions;

• Security apparatus: Internal conflicts, small arms proliferation, riots and protests, fatalities from conflicts, military coups, rebel activities, militancy, bombings;

• Factionalized elites: Power struggles and flawed elections;

• External threats: Foreign military intervention, threat of invasion, international sanctions, and credit downgrades. (See http://ffp.statesindex.org/indicators)

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The only thing holding the country together is the Filipino’s deep wellspring of hope. He pins hope on everything: televised investigations, elections, Christmas, New Year, Papal visit, and self-improvement like the newly launched Huwag Ka Magnakaw (Do Not Steal) Movement.

The last is particularly uniting: the seventh of Ten Commandments is common to Christians, Muslims, Judaists, Buddhists. “Huwag Ka Magnakaw” aims to regain the Filipino’s lost dignity, from false leaders who have universalized, institutionalized, constitutionalized corruption. The call applies to all, from tots who filch loose change from parents, students who cheat in exams, and traders who profiteer, to contractors who bribe officials and politicos who plunder.

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