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THE
declaration by Trade Secretary Peter Favila that
henceforth, no Chinese-ODA-funded project will move
forward until all stakeholders are consulted, sounds
rational and is welcome news.
Yet, it
raises the question of whether this should have been
done with all other ODA-funded projects, for that
matter, and whether this should have been done in the
first place—even before the crisis over the national
broadband network (NBN) deal with Chinese telco ZTE Co.,
erupted. Officials have clearly explained that the
decision to put more checks in the system for vetting
Chinese-funded projects had arisen precisely from the
megaheadaches caused by the NBN, which would have been
funded by a $329-million official loan from Beijing.
In
setting up such greater checks, Secretary Favila said it
is hoped such would avoid the spectacle of having a
major project like NBN “already there before someone
opposes it.” Hence, he added, his team, as mandated by
President Arroyo, is doing an inventory of all the
pending projects proposed for Chinese funding.
He
singled out the proposed South Rail project, and said
his team will present all the documents pertaining to
this to “all stakeholders,” presumably to avoid
instances where major undertakings invite a hailstorm of
protests after the ink has dried on the documents where
officials—with the President as witness, no less—affixed
their signatures.
Yet,
while Mr. Favila’s revelations are welcome, they signal,
as we stated earlier, the glaring gaps that have
attended the process by which we vet projects in this
country. Ironic, considering that since 1986 when the
world poured billions of ODA dollars to support the
then-darling of the democratic world—the first post-Edsa
government—the economy has relied substantially on loans
and grants from both bilateral and multilateral donors
in order to move forward while one foot is shackled with
payments for the Marcos-era,
state-guaranteed-but-crony-contracted debts.
In fact,
through the years the National Economic and Development
Authority (Neda) was serving as the central processing
center for all the ODA-funded projects, many of the
big-ticket items in the medium-term development plan and
the public-investments plan were accounted for by such
foreign-assisted undertakings. For all the previous
allegations of “tied” aid, the fact is that the
Philippine government relied greatly on some help from
foreign friends, notably the Japanese for
infrastructure.
Why, the
Mindanao peace and development blueprint after the
historic 1996 peace agreement with the Moro National
Liberation Front was anchored on a multidonor-assistance
scheme coordinated by the United Nations.
To be
fair then, we should really have no quarrel with foreign
assistance, but it is entirely our lookout—not the
foreign donors’—to ensure that the loans and
technical-assistance grants are used in the most
cost-effective way possible. Moreover, projects that
unavoidably rely on foreign loans, as the NBN-ZTE would
have done if it weren’t aborted, must truly be those
that cannot be funded any other way by the private
sector under a build-operate-transfer scheme or any
variant that shifts the financial burden away from a
cash-strapped government and a burdened taxpayer.
So when
Mr. Favila says henceforth all Chinese-ODA project
proposals will go through some sort of screening to
elicit any objections from stakeholders, this is really
part of looking out for our own interest. It’s just
bothersome that it now seems none of such vetting
happened in the case of the NBN-ZTE—a proposition that
the Neda strongly objected to. And yet, at the end of
the day, Neda had declined to release any of the
documents sought by senators, which would indicate the
seriousness with which its technical people combed
through the NBN-ZTE in the first place. A pity, for now
the mandate seems to have shifted to the DTI, and Neda’s
“secrecy” is partly to blame. |
