End of (100) days
by Dr. Giovanni Tapang, Ph.D.
In investigating the characteristics of a certain system, one usually performs several measurements simultaneously on it to obtain an average description. Alternatively, one can observe the system for a certain period to find statistical and qualitative behavior patterns that do not change over time. If we have a-priori knowledge about the system’s dynamics, unexpected data points usually indicate the need to revise our original description. On the other hand, if the measurements match our a-priori description, it further validates it and makes it useful in forecasting future behavior.
Describing things and events in ordinary life is no different. The news that we read and hear tells us about the state of things as they happen (together with whatever bias) which one usually couples with direct personal and collective experience. This predilection to observe things for a fixed period of time is the reason why the first 100 days of an administration becomes news in itself.
The current Aquino administration’s first 100 days in office is certainly no different. His campaign promises and rhetoric of +gdaang matuwid+h together with his State of the Nation Address become our a-priori knowledge of his administration’s plans and programs and serves as our yardstick with which to measure his presidency in the past three months.
We recall that in a previous column, we wrote about the immense but not entirely impossible challenges that President Aquino would have to face in order to undo underdevelopment in the country. However, instead of planning for domestic industrial growth to provide local goods and jobs, we have heard about the Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) in the President’s State of the Nation Address. This was realized when he visited the United States offering about P740-billion worth of privatization projects, coupled with generous tax and other incentives to big foreign investors. The President promises $2.4 billion of these investments in the next three years as part of his gain from the US visit. He also promises 40,000 new jobs to be created from these investments.
Yet this is but a drop in the bucket since around half of the Philippine labor force of 39 million are either unemployed or seeking additional employment. Around 30 percent of the graduates last March (around half a million) ended up unemployed. Those who are employed have minimum wage rates that are around one-fourth of a decent living wage.
What is worse is that the burden of the privatization of public utilities and basic industries is going to be shouldered by the public. The riding public is faced with increases in the Metro Rail Transit (MRT) and Light Railway Transit (LRT) systems in Metro Manila, increases in the rates charged by private water utility companies on top of the already high—and increasing—power rates.
This lack of jobs and lack of industries would be challenges to be faced by Aquino’s secretary for the Department of Science and Technology, engineer Mario Montejo. Coming from a very public presidential reprimand of the weather chief (which ended the removal from office of Dr. Nilo Rosas) and a budget for his department that remains very small in terms of UN recommendations for a developing country, Secretary Montejo would have to contend with the acceleration of the brain drain due to further denationalization and deindustrialization that the PPP projects will bring.
It is not just a matter of increasing the numbers of highly trained and motivated men and women in science and engineering if there would be no place for them to go in the country. With our country still lacking basic industries and faced with a shrinking domestic manufacturing sector, they have nowhere to go except abroad or be absorbed by existing corporations that are mostly foreign-owned and -controlled.
It would be one-sided and futile if we hope to develop the forces of production which includes scientists and technologists without addressing relations that keep it in a stunted and backward state—foreign investment-led development, export oriented and import dependent manufacturing and industrial activity, feudal and semi-feudal agricultural production.
At the end of Aquino’s first century of days, it seems that the basic issues that we have pointed out to comprehensively develop science and technology are being overlooked. We cannot continue to be a country that produces mainly agricultural products and raw or semi-processed minerals for export and expect the need for expert scientists and engineers. The dependence on foreign investments and imports for capital creates a lack of industrial pull that allows our scientists and engineers to stay here in the country. Unless a massive shift in policy occurs in this administration to engage in genuine agrarian reform and domestic industrialization, it seems that the perennial problem of underdevelopment would remain as it had in the past.
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