How will the Bongbong Marcos administration be remembered a decade hence?
This administration will not be remembered for any centerpiece construction project. Congress chopped up the infrastructure funds into small, easily looted morsels, thereby preventing the President from building anything remotely monumental. The President allowed the legislators to run amuck with the budget.
This administration will not be remembered for any revolution in our agriculture. Bongbong, in the first stage of his term, held on to the agriculture portfolio but introduced no new program. Over the past three years, we have become even more dependent on importing food. Our uneconomical subsistence farms inhibited improvements in productivity.
This administration will not be remembered for restoring fiscal sanity and taming our propensity to incur debt. On the contrary, the past three years saw our deficits balloon and our debt grow exponentially. The money was used mainly to buy public approval: subsidized rice, fare discounts and the various cash transfer gimmicks. All of them failed to buy victory in the midterm elections.
This administration did not take a major step forward towards more equitable wealth distribution. There was no program to accomplish that. The massive corruption involving the political establishment further widened the gap between rich and poor. Food inflation outstripped wages.
This administration did not rebuild the economy’s industrial core even if the President’s numerous trips abroad was packaged as investment-seeking missions. With the thin power reserves we have, we could not support industrialization even if we had a viable program to achieve this.
This administration did not transform the country into a tourism powerhouse. The unsystematic improvement of our ports and airports made our tourist areas inaccessible. A persistently high rate of criminality discouraged tourist arrivals. Now the specter of political chaos compounds the problem.
This administration made no gains in solving rural poverty. With our logistics system still backward and without any progress in farm integration, rural incomes did not improve. Migration to the cities continued, magnifying urban poverty. With the domestic economy unable to offer attractive employment opportunities, we continue to export people.
This administration did not strengthen the institutional foundations of our democracy. Instead, corrupt dynasties continue to wield power and a kleptocracy has taken hold. We still do not have a functioning political party system. Even the poorly conceived party-list system did not improve representation. It was commandeered by corrupt contractors eyeing to loot the public treasury even more.
This administration did not inspire confidence. When South Korea cancelled an infrastructure loan package because it feared the money might just be stolen, that was a national embarrassment. We were once called The Sick Man of Asia. We have returned to that status. We are also seen as the region’s most corrupt polity.
This administration did not fashion a truly independent foreign policy. Instead, we pulled closer to a fading superpower and moved further away from Asia’s powerhouse economy. We allowed what will be a lingering territorial dispute to eclipse an independent national economic strategy.
Over the past few weeks, a corruption scandal of truly grotesque proportions overwhelmed the national conversation. It will continue to consume the national discourse through the remainder of this administration and beyond. It will define the disposition and temper of the electorate for years.
The most important presidential initiative this week is the issuance of an executive order establishing a commission to look into the corruption that sabotaged any improvement in the nation’s infrastructure. This was a forced move. Citizens were rioting in Indonesia and Nepal over corruption. Our government is frantic to avoid falling into the same political dynamic.
It remains to be seen if this commission is empowered enough to break the criminal syndicates that have encrusted government. It remains to be seen if this extraordinary commission will win the public’s trust. It remains to be seen if its work will dent the deep-seated culture of corruption that undermined our political institutions. It remains to be seen if this commission can act fast enough to avert a political outburst.
In such a short time, public trust in our agencies of government evaporated alarmingly. Employees of the DPWH, for instance, have been allowed to dispense wearing their uniforms to avoid being harassed in public. Banks are limiting exposure to companies working on government projects.
In the following weeks and months, Bongbong Marcos will be consumed by the need to keep his head above the flood of corruption and inferior governance spilling onto the public conversation. He had not been proactive enough to deliver clean and competent government. The scale of the corruption scandal attests to that.
The commission he intends to form will be the centerpiece of national attention. This will be in place of the flagship project he failed to put together.
His public relations campaign tries to project him as the lead actor in the fight against corruption. That has, so far, been a difficult message to sell. For three consecutive years, the national budget was mangled by his closest allies and he allowed the mangling to pass. He is miscast as an anti-corruption crusader.
Everything will be done to save the king. This might include throwing his most notorious allies overboard or under the bus. The leadership he represents will be a dwindling faction, under long siege from the streets by a justifiably angry people.