Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s first State of the Nation address was highly anticpated, both by his detractors and his supporters, for obvious reasons.
The 15M Filipinos who voted for the opposition candidate were eager to find fault, to the point of nitpicking, because they’re politically immature. They will never get behind the majority of Filipinos who voted for Marcos. To them, it’s not about numbers but more about their belief that their cause is right and just. Never mind that the greather majority of Filipinos disagree with them.
But as their ranks in government have been decimated, both at the national and the local level, it’s about time to focus on the problems and challenges we currently face as a nation.
I have three major issues with Marcos’ SONA on agricuture, education and e-governance. Agriculture and education are two sectors which are in a crisis wrought by more than three decades of wrong policies, particularly the fact that both don’t have any long-term development plans since 1986.
Marcos has taken on the agriculture portfolio himself, giving importance to food security but in his SONA, there were few details about how to improve agricultural output.
Instead, the focus is again on agrarian reform. Marcos promised that students who take up agricultural courses in state universities and colleges who don’t have land to till will be given land. He will be issuing a moratorium on the collection of amortizations due from farmers who have been awarded land but have been delinquent in their payments.
Both are expensive propositions because government will again be footing the bill without any real target set. Marcos has repeatedly used the term value-chain in agriculture and has mentioned that he will focus on building farm-to-market roads but that has been the policy of all post-EDSA President’s without any improvement in agricultural output to show for.
Economies of scale and logistics are the main problems of our farmers. This is why middlemen thrive and the number of middlemen is what drives up prices of agricultural commodities.
Organizing farmers into cooperatives has resulted in limited success. The same problems beset cooperatives throughout the country. It’s about time that the government takes a look at the feasibility of organizing public-private partnerships in agriculture or better yet, partner with farmers themselves in a plantation style setup, similar to what Dole and Del Monte have done with pineapple.
I don’t see Marcos’ strategy producing any improvement in agricultural output by the middle of his term. He also didn’t mention anything about the smuggling of agricultural commodities. Perhaps, that is included in his orders to the newly-appointed Customs Commissioner. We will see what happens.
The second issue is education. Marcos mentioned about the fourth industrial revolution but did not talk about the solution, which is the paradigm shift from the traditional face-to-face classes but to blended learning. It’s ironic how the pandemic pushed public and private academic institutions in adopting blended learning out of necessity only to be told that they would need to go back to the tradtional methodology.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand that the poor students have problems with money to buy a mobile device and internet connection. I have spoken at length to two public school teachers; one who handles Grade 1 classes and the other, senior high school students. This is not the only problem poor students face but also the fact that their instructors are barely qualified to teach the subjects they have been assigned.
There is also the lack of supervision on the part of the parents or those who are overly concerned about their children’s education but take no active part in performing their role at home to get their children to study their lessons.
The challenges in education are as gargantuan as bureaucratic reform. There has to be a defnitive strategy with phased implementation. Otherwise, nothing will get done again in six years except for superficial improvements, without any quantitative and qualitative improvements in learner’s skillsets.
Education 4.0 is the new paradigm in response to Industry 4.0 or the fourth industrial revolution. There should be a step-by-step approach to edcuation reforms, the two main challenges of which are the bureaucracy at DepEd and the mindset of the officials and the teachers themselves. I don’t think six years is enough to get everything done given that the problems aren’t only with the DepEd but also with other departments such as DICT when it comes to internet connectivity.
E-governance has been a long time coming. Marcos’ predecessor mentioned this in his SONA’s over the course of his term but given that he’s not tech literate himself, there was no real marching order for the government bureaucracy to adopt digitization. Government departments and agencies will not take the initiative because is deprives them of income-generating opportunities from corruption. Greasing the bureaucracy to get the job done is the norm, rather than the exception.
ARTA, as the product of the ease of doing business law, is a joke. Since its creation, there has only been slight improvements in the bureaucratic quagmire. It’s only lip service and lends credence that while we have laws, it’s in implementation where government is weakest at because any move to reform is immediately blocked.
These major problems, brings us to the root cause, which is the political structure in place since 1986. Marcos made no mention of constitutional amendments to our government structure. Consistency is also the main concern of foreign investors. We can’t have a new President every six years whose policy may or may not change from his predecessor.
Marcos ran under the wings of the Partido Federal ng Pilipinas. Early on in the campaign, he was asked if he was in favor of federalism to which he responded in the affirmative. To my mind, what the points he highlighted in his first SONA are mostly good but what of the manner of implementation given that most of the more arduous tasks can’t be completed within his term?
No less than two of his predecessors, GMA and Duterte, have stated that a shift to a federal parliamentary system is needed if the country is to become as progressive as its ASEAN neighbors.
I don’t see any reason why Marcos didn’t mention political structural reform as primary goal of his administration. He has the mandate. The mandate comes with the political capital needed to get it past Congress and then the Filipino people.
Marcos shouldn’t allow this opportunity to pass. He can’t be mired in the past with nostalgia about how Apo Lakay governed during his time.
It’s his time now and he should act forthrightly because few are given second opportunities to do so.
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