ISSUE ANALYSIS No. 9
JUNE 13, 2008
Series of 2008

Crisis Management, Arroyo Style

By the Policy Study, Publication and Advocacy (PSPA)
Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG)

Long queues of people wait for their turn to buy NFA rice; gas prices shoot up every week as the country faces unprecedented high inflation; parents are uncertain whether they will be able to send their children to school; the rate of unemployment is highest in decades; and the number of victims of disease epidemics and calamities is mounting by the year.

Is the government in control of the deteriorating situation? Is there any prospect for the country to weather the economic and political morass that it is in?

With the vast executive powers it wields and the financial resources at its disposal, the Arroyo administration should be able to grapple with the country’s woes by the horns, so to speak, and navigate past danger zones. Yet its style of crisis management reveals a propensity to use, on the one hand, short-term, quick-fix solutions to problems that cry for comprehensive and responsible response and, on the other, costly PR strategies to project a president in control of a ship that is fast sinking.

Mrs. Gloria M. Arroyo’s knee-jerk response to the food and oil crises, for instance, is too late. Her damage control tack is to first make the people believe that it is the result of an unavoidable global crisis way beyond government’s control when in fact the fuel and food security problems can be traced to poor priorities and simple lack of foresight. Thousands of youths won’t be able to enter school this year due to insurmountable high education costs while the shortage of teachers and classrooms is at critical proportions. To all these, the president now styles herself as Merlin the magician with a wand of subsidies worth P4 billion taken, so she claims, from E-vat collections. The subsidies are for distribution to schoolchildren, power consumers, poorest households, farmers, and the land transportation sector. Is she doing all these as an accomplishment in her coming state-of-the-nation address (SONA)?

Rehash

Some of the subsidies are a rehash of previous promises though. Faced with prolonged budget deficits and unsolved corruption scandals, Arroyo’s package of “subsidies” comes across as nothing but stopgap remedies with no promise of long-term effect. The handout is held with suspect, coming as it is from a president widely believed to have used government resources for her own political ends, who authored multi-billion transactions for the greed of her business cronies and close allies, and definitely a person without any genuine compassion for the poor except as a cheap publicity gimmick.

The president’s resort to “band-aid” solutions and other incredible prescriptions is exemplified by her full endorsement of globalization policies as a means of addressing poverty, unemployment, and other social and economic ills. The costs of this economic paradigm have been staggering: 28 million individuals rated as poor or an increase by four million in just three years; four million jobless; a wide income gap with the net worth of the country’s 10 richest individuals ($12.4 billion) equivalent to the total annual income of the poorest 9.8 million families. Arroyo’s personal assets, in the meantime, went up by at least P11 million in the past year alone.

As in past regimes, the management of economic programs has been run by the president’s economic advisers and academic elite intoxicated by the bitter pills of international finance institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, and the Asian Development Bank. The stimulus for this package has been to increase the taxpayers’ burden, pay the huge foreign debt and further liberalize the country’s trade and investment to transnational corporations in tandem with the local finance oligarchs and Arroyo’s business cronies. In the course of implementing development projects and budget allocations, billions of pesos have been lost to corruption.

Economic governance

Meanwhile, the constitutionally-enshrined infrastructures of people’s participation in economic governance have been largely written off while those who oppose the regime’s indefensible policies are tagged as de-stabilizers. The president’s subservience to foreign interests and local finance oligarchs accounts for the threats to food security, energy requirements, and other socio-economic costs and exposes Arroyo’s “pro-poor” and “meal for every table” posturing as an empty rhetoric.

Another case is Arroyo’s counter-insurgency program. Tagging the armed Left as a “national security threat,” the president unleashed Oplan Bantay Laya targeting the “enemy of the state’s” alleged legal political network. Flaunted as part of the state’s counter-terrorism measures, the counter-insurgency program enhanced U.S. military assistance and political support for Arroyo. It was also used by Arroyo to maintain military loyalty and to promote hawkish senior AFP officers based on the number of suspected “communist terrorists” killed or abducted. The costs of Arroyo’s national security doctrine have been monumental: 903 activists summarily executed and 193 others victims of enforced disappearance. The peace process that seeks to address the institutional roots of the armed struggle has long been abandoned in favor of the short-term militarist approach.

Like past administrations, the Arroyo regime has been in a crisis mode since the very beginning of its reign. Instead of instituting reforms toward addressing the long-running problems of land dispossession, low labor wages, and a host of other concerns of the very same people who catapulted her to power in January 2001, she chose to align herself with the narrow, elitist interests of her allies and business cronies. She shielded from investigation her fellow conspirators in politics, the military, business, and the Commission on Elections who ensured her presidential power in one of the most fraudulent elections – the 2004 presidential derby.

Misfortunes

She blames others like the Left and the electoral opposition for the misfortunes that are caused by her own mismanagement and a poor diagnosis fed by her neo-liberal perspective and anti-progressive biases. Aside from this “wag-the-dog” approach, there is no transparency of information about the magnitude and roots of problems thus putting her prescribed solutions under public suspicion if not rejection. Arrogance is saliently at the core of her management style: “I’m not bothered by what public surveys say about my performance because God knows that what I do is for the good of the people.”

While according the long-lasting and most-favored-treatment to financial credit institutions, TNCs and the economic elite through her globalization policies, she has nothing or, if any, only piecemeal measures for the vast majority of Filipinos. Her offensives against political dissent and human rights have strengthened the coercive powers of the state thereby further weakening the justice system. The same iron-fist policy is likewise under criticism among the business sector in her pursuit of, for instance, appropriating power distribution into the hands of her business cronies under the guise of state takeover.

Perhaps the worst component of her crisis management is to take each problem from the perspective of surviving the presidency. In these critical times – induced no less by her dangerous policies – every major economic problem or criticism to her presidential rule is treated as a threat to her presidential survival. This insecurity is what drives her to react with quick-fix solutions that are designed to cushion public reactions, complete with PR cosmetics and threats to harness her authoritarian powers.

Actually, the problems faced by multitudes of Filipinos are basically the same that the people saw in the past and have deep institutional roots. The only difference is that while in the past such predicaments were aggravating by the year, today people are hurting by the day.