2024: Harnessing hope for change


OF SUBSTANCE AND SPIRIT

Managing public governance deficit

New year is an opportunity for this hopeful nation to initiate change, to achieve more progress, to work for greatness.

New year is creating doors of opportunities to make 2024 as close as to what it actually means. The 4 in 2024 in Hebrew is daleth, and it means door. And yes, whenever we talk of opportunities, we would always refer to a door, such that some wise guys even tweaked it and argued that if a door of opportunities does not present itself, better create such door. 

New year is doing something about that latest Pulse Asia on the holiday season that shows Filipinos are incurably hopeful people. The survey indicates that 92 percent of the 1,200 respondents faced the new year “with hope,” a score practically unchanged from that of the year before. 

But we need to reconcile that with labor market statistics. While the percentages of unemployed and underemployed persons seem to be improving, the absolutes remain disturbing. As of October 2023, some 2.1 million did not have jobs and 5.6 million out of 47.8 million employed Filipinos continued to seek more hours of work, or additional jobs, or new jobs with longer working hours. 

One will also be puzzled why only 30 percent of those hopeful Filipinos indicated that their families would be “more prosperous” last Christmas, actually some 13- percentage-point drop from the November 2022 survey. On the other hand, those who responded by saying their family’s prosperity would be poorer than last year stood at 13 percent, a seven-percentage-point increase. Status quo, or no change, is the response of 57 percent of the respondents, or a five-percentage-point gain. 

Pulse Asia President Ronald Holmes was correct in characterizing our people as hopeful, or optimistic. Perhaps, but it is arguable whether putting together those who categorically said their conditions would be more prosperous and those who believed they were unchanged as the year before, is meaningful at all. Making money on the same level as one did the year before is not actually making progress especially when one tries to compare this with PSA’s easing unemployment and underemployment rates. Admittedly, they are not comparable, but they should point to the same broad direction. If the percentages of unemployed and underemployed dropped, but their perceived level of prosperity had not changed, something has to give.

Rappler resident sociologist Jayeel Cornelio was correct in saying that hope is not always correlated with prosperity. Citing the latest survey by the Social Weather Stations for September to October 2023, over 48 percent of Filipino families described themselves as “mahirap” or poor, while 27 percent responded they were borderline poor. They sum up to 75 percent poor. Only 25 percent thought they were not poor.

Hope may as well be driven by our spirituality, that as Jeremiah 29:11 clarifies, the Lord’s plan is for our “welfare and not for evil,” to give us “a future and a hope.” Unlike Rappler’s Cornelio, I would argue that being hopeful is always a good thing. There is value in celebrating hope. Being always hopeful should not lead us to refrain from questioning the more fundamental issues of poverty and income inequality in a period of perceived growth and prosperity. Being always hopeful does not negate the ability to manage expectations; instead, we should be motivated to persevere because there is something to hope for. Hope allows us precisely to work out an exit strategy from a situation in which one’s family prosperity is retreating rather than advancing. Contrary to some propositions, hope is not passive, neither does it lead to dependence. 

Hope may not replace a manual of what to-dos, or management strategy inspired by Harvard Business School, but it is something that pushes us to make those manuals and management strategies. It is Lincoln’s “believing you have the will and the way to accomplish your goals.” And that is essential in all circumstances.

As long as there is hope, no matter how small, we can offer better options than what we perceive today as poor political and economic governance. We can organize concerned Filipinos to develop a better electoral system through legislative action. Educating the Filipino electorate is also critical to reject social media fake news and begin to vote wisely for those who have the competence, integrity and character, and experience in public service. 

By this time, that eureka moment should have dawned on all those voters who failed to scratch beyond the surface of slogans and tarpaulin propaganda. Non-government organizations (NGOs) like the Foundation for Economic Freedom and Action for Economic Reforms should sustain their advocacies and on-the-ground collaboration with policy makers in achieving people-friendly, market-friendly policy and structural reforms in agriculture, agrarian reform, power, transport and big infra projects. We also need to support those political positions taken by concerned organizations like 1Sambayan against the extra-territorial ambitions of China. Beyond diplomacy, those territorial disputes carry some patently economic and political significance.

Congress should do better than just deleting confidential and intelligence funds from the annual budget of those departments and offices that have no actual need for them. We need to scrutinize those lump sum allocations especially to big ticket infra projects by organizing professional groups of economists, accountants and auditors who can appear before congressional hearings to help rationalize the budget process.   

We need to summon hope in dealing with the poverty of our literacy. 

The latest findings by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) illustrate that the Filipino students remain among the world’s weakest in mathematics, reading and science. No significant improvements have been seen compared to the results of five years ago. Despite all the massive budget funneled to education, and the reforms undertaken, it was reported that less than a quarter of our students reached the minimum level of proficiency in the three subjects. With hope, we can work more purposely and more smartly in overhauling our educational system in favor of science and technology, even teaching our students how to think critically. We can go along with focused, time-bound cash-transfer intervention if only to ensure our young students have something inside their tummy and between their ears when attending classes. 

Short of these, we may not be exactly preparing the next generation to do better than what we have done during our time. With hope, we should by all means create those doors of opportunities for change, for progress, and for greatness.