The next administration is going to face a hefty debt burden plus a shrinking economy and a rising unemployment rate and hunger due to the mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon said on Wednesday.
Drilon blamed this mismanagement on the Department of Health (DOH) saying the reason why the country is lagging behind in terms of the availability of the vaccines is because of the failure to secure the much-needed doses early thru advance payments with vaccine manufacturers.
“Let me emphasize that where we are today is the result of the mismanagement of the DOH of our pandemic responses. Our original sin, if I may call it as such, is when we refused to close our borders on China,” Drilon said in an interview on ANC’s Headstart.
“The inoculation is very slow. At the rate we are going, I don’t know when we can achieve herd immunity,” he said.
So the next administration, the minority leader said, would be bombarded by both the short and long term impacts of the pandemic.
For instance, he said the record high of P10.9-trillion national debt as of April will become a burden of the next administration.
“I don’t know why they want to run for President. We have this hefty debt...these are very difficult challenges for the next administration. I repeat, this hefty debt, as a result of the pandemic, is a challenge,” he pointed out.
The opposition senator also said the state economic manager team’s projection that the Philippine economy would be able to recover starting the second quarter of 2022 is just a “pipe dream.”
Drilon pointed out the country’s national debt continues to increase as the government will have to resort to more borrowings to finance its COVID-19 response.
He also said the economy has already shrank by 4.2 percent during the first quarter of this year and recorded a full-year 2020 economic contraction of 9.5 percent. The World Bank has also recently downgraded the Philippine economic forecast from 5.5 percent to 4.7 percent.
“I don’t believe that. Even with the election spending in 2022, I don’t think we would be able to be on the road to recovery by the second quarter of 2022,” he said.
“To say that we will be going back to the 2019 economic level by the second quarter of 2022 is a pipe dream,” Drilon said.