Soaked

Our miseries just would not end.

A string of weather disturbances has been plotted east of the country. The danger is not any storm making landfall. The danger is in the capacity of tropical depressions to draw the southwest monsoon, delivering heavy rains to our soaked land.

We did not expect, in this “super” El Niño year, to be dealing with excess water. We thought drought would be the problem – which could still happen towards the end of this year and early the next.

Last week, our dams needed to release water into the swollen rivers of Luzon. Shortly before that, we were monitoring reports of these dams falling below critical operational level. Such are the wonders of global warming – and the extreme weather it causes.

Central Luzon farms do not need any more water. They are already submerged. Over the past few days, even the highways have been flooded. Bridges collapsed. Entire towns are cut off. The costs of this calamity are rising fast.

We inherit decades of poor public works planning and inferior construction. The dikes are melting in the face of surging rivers. City streets are inundated because of inadequate drainage capacity.

Harvests have been ruined. Food could not be delivered to the cities. Over the next few days, expect food prices to spike more than they usually do on rainy days.

Severe weather may be understandable. But the substandard infrastructure to defend against the effects of severe weather is not. We are now paying for decades of corrupt government and inferior planning.

We know what went wrong – especially the runaway looting of public works funds over the past three years. What we do not know is whether or not there is a realistic strategy available to surmount the onslaught of calamities.

Earlier this month, the President blamed poor garbage disposal for the clogging of our waterways. He did not mention that poor garbage collection is the controllable variable here. About 15 million people crowd what we call Mega Manila. We do not have a suitable solid waste disposal facility. The neglect should be denounced as criminal.

For years, there existed a master plan for managing the rivers of Central Luzon. Yet government continued to disburse money through congressional districts. We know why. We know this resulted in disjointed and substandard projects. But we have yet to denounce the absolute treason that brought this calamity upon all of us.

The last we heard the President address this calamity is when he said there was too much rain. We cannot keep blaming the weather for our misfortunes. That is not accountability. We must understand how we got here.

E-governance

At least a few things are working.

The effort to digitalize governance is at least moving forward. Per the latest count, the government portal eGovPH has been downloaded 61 million times. The portal has processed more than 900 million transactions. That translates into so much savings of time and resources.

The physical national ID card may have succumbed to fraud. But 92 million digital national IDs have been issued through eGovPH. This rescues the whole project.

The portal’s verification layer, eVerify, has confirmed identities 300 million times. Use of the platform grew 700 percent over the past year. At least digital government transactions are growing even if our economy is not.

Our citizens are not compelled to download the government app. They do so because it works. They do so because transacting with the state through one’s phone beats every other alternative.

The government portal opens 1,332 government services organized into 95 modules. The system was designed entirely by government employees. It was produced in-house under the direction of Undersecretary David Almirol Jr. without resort to outside contractors. In a country where public technology is more often a procurement story rather than an engineering one, this is a rare case.

Contractors have justly acquired a bad name in this country. The e-governance operation that involves zero contractors and no investment in advertising deserves some respect.

Credit must be given the forward-looking E-Governance Act for an initiative like this one to begin blooming. The law provides a basis for the portal to exist. But it does not, unfortunately, guarantee the program will be adequately funded.

In the proposed 2027 national budget, the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) is seeking about P2.7 billion of e-government. Roughly P800 million of this proposed allocation is for the widely used super app itself. This is meager when set against the proposed national budget of P7.2 trillion – a third of which goes to servicing the national debt.

Measured against the traffic the platform now carries, each verification request works out to roughly three pesos per transaction. That is about what a text message used to cost before. Within the present setup, three pesos is the whole cost of moving a document that once cost an entire working day.

The platform found its ceiling last April when GCash, Maya and the DSWD began verifying identities through it. The new DICT roadmap is specific: build enough capacity to hold at peak rather than at average; put in an artificial intelligence layer that processes documents in minutes instead of weeks; onboard local governments still stamping permits by hand; begin moving government data back from Singapore where most of it is presently stored.

Solid targets, small budget.