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AND now
for the good news: some people might overlook it, but
for those of us frustrated no end by the past years’
spectacle of reenacted budgets and a Congress in
deadlock with the Executive on what should be its most
important output for the year, i.e., the General
Appropriations Act, the pace and developments in this
year’s budget process come as a refreshing tableau.
This
means that for the second time in six years, we won’t be
staring at a reenacted budget because our lawmakers,
maligned for grandstanding and seemingly endless
politicking, have crafted the national budget just in
time for the year it’s supposed to be in use.
On
Tuesday night, the Senate approved on third and final
reading the Palace-certified P1.23-trillion budget bill
for 2008, after adopting last-minute amendments by
minority senators to slash the vaunted Kilos Asenso
program—seen as Malacañang’s pork barrel—by P500
million, and reallocating the amount to the departments
of Health and Education.
But the
more remarkable part of the tedious process of
scrutinizing each part of the budget, haggling and
give-and-take, is that on the long-drawn discussions on
debt service. Even more noteworthy is the increasingly
substantial role that lawmakers are granting
civil-society groups, notably Social Watch Philippines
and the Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC) for the second
straight year. That the activists and the lawmakers,
including a grizzled Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile, can
patiently throw arguments at each other, signals a
certain progress in the campaign to reform the budget
process, and to really transform “pro-poor” and
“propeople” rhetoric into tangible funding support for
worthy projects and programs. As the process has
matured, so have the protagonists. Gone, thankfully, are
the days when activists were faulted for devoting most
of their time on the streets and street gimmicks, than
on solid research—the better to debate with public
officials. Gone as well are the days when lawmakers
thought of themselves as gods who alone can dictate what
money and how much goes where; today it seems they’ve
found a better interpretation of their constitutional
duty to guard the purse—less by ensuring their own
private pork barrel, though there’s still a big chunk of
that, and more by giving the people a real “payback” for
their trouble in paying taxes despite the increasingly
difficult task of making ends meet.
In
Tuesday’s haggling at the Senate, Enrile, finance
committee chairman and main sponsor of the budget bill,
accepted a proposal to include a special provision on
unprogrammed funds so that savings made from debt
service as a result of foreign-exchange improvements,
would likewise be allocated to health and education
programs. The debt issue has been a festering wound on
the nation’s side since 1986, when Juan de la Cruz first
reckoned with the reality that he was “committed”—by the
then dictator-president—to pay humongous loans for
projects that benefited largely private or crony
interest, mostly in terms of kickback-tainted funds. The
lawmakers have repeatedly shot down any unilateral
repudiation of debt, patiently explaining the
repercussions of that to them. Mainly, the country’s
being shut out in the global credit market, in turn
squeezing the economy and causing more misery all
around—in short, a too-simplistic solution that could
cause more harm than good. But since then, negotiations
between lawmakers and civil society have moved forward,
with each doing more homework, so that this year
Congress could no longer ignore the very specific list
of projects for which the republic had dutifully paid
loans, regardless of the fact that many of them were
either stopped, never carried out, or turned out to be
white elephants that benefited no one. From that list of
specifics was thus drawn up the amount by which debt
service should be reduced, so that there would be a
compelling reason for both sides—borrower and
creditor—to negotiate.
Earlier,
the House of Representatives pegged debt-service
reduction for the so-called illegitimate debts at P11
billion, pending renegotiation and/or condonation. The
Enrile committee, however, decided to reverse this
reduction on the ground that there must be “legroom”—or
some standby fund from which to draw payments in case
negotiation fails.
Thankfully, Senator Enrile restored P5.7 billion of the
P12.1-billion cuts, the balance to be rechannelled to
health, education and productive items in the budget.
Still,
the FDC contends there is no need for such “legroom,”
noting how the Arroyo administration had consistently
overestimated its debt-service payments, especially for
interest. From 2002 to 2007, for instance, there is on
average a P12.15-billion gap between programmed and
actual interest-payment expenses; with the gap expanding
to P28.89 billion in 2006.
This,
then is where the debate stands as of press time, with
the FDC pressing lawmakers to restore the debt-payment
cuts to the full P12.1-billion made by the House.
Where
the bicameral work will go is too early to predict. But
if last year’s experience was a gauge, where Social
Watch Philippines and allied groups kept vigil at every
bicam meeting, it’s safe to presume civil society will
keep engaging Congress this year.
The FDC
position is clear enough. It laments that: “Debt
payments even for loans, which went through irregular
processes and, which are found to finance anomalous
projects, and projects which were never beneficial and,
in the worst situation, were even detrimental to the
public, are automatically appropriated.” Because of PD
1177, the automatic-appropriations law, legislators had
become “complacent in the monitoring of payments for
loan-financed projects, paving the way for the
proliferation of illegitimate debts.”
It’s
ironic, indeed, that politicians have been knocking
Marcos for the longest time, yet few have taken the
trouble to disaggregate the good from the bad
loan-funded projects; the onerous from the reasonable
borrowings. The budget process has provided the venue
for that thankless job, and if only for this, the effort
has been worth it. |
