IF you want official data on the infrastructure accomplishments of the Aquino administration, the agency to turn to is, of course, the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Center.
It is a specialized agency created under the PPP program. The center does nothing but keep track of, or monitor, the status of all investment projects—most of them big-ticket infrastructure projects—in the PPP pipeline.
Officially, the good news is that there are about 55 such projects in the pipeline “in varying stages of the project cycle.” The PPP Center released a document revealing this fact during a Philippine Economic Briefing on September 30. The briefing was a prelude to the 40th Philippine Business Conference, to be held from October 22 to 24 and to be presided over by George T. Barcelon as chairman.
The bad news, however, is that, of those 55 projects, only five of them will see completion by mid-2016, or by the time President Aquino’s term ends. (The implication is that several others may be approved before the May 2016 elections, and it would be up to the proponents to fight for their implementation when the next administration takes over.)
These five projects, however, would not even begin to ease the ordeals being suffered by residents of Metro Manila on a daily basis in putting up with the horrendous traffic, commuting and flooding problems that have put them, virtually, at the very “gates of hell.”
An Agence France-Presse (AFP) report on the “infrastructure woes” that bedevil Filipinos in Metro Manila describes how a typical commuter, a salesman, in the metropolis’s “creaking train network” has to endure a three-hour work commute every day, with half that time spent on just lining up to buy a train ticket.
“Peak-hour hell comes in many forms in the city of 12 million people, with commuters experiencing a sweaty, stinky crush on dilapidated trains and giant queues to buy tickets,” the AFP dispatch said.
“This is just one example of major infrastructure woes that, analysts say, threaten to cool the Philippines’s red-hot economy,” it added. (Except for the part that our economy is red-hot right now, I totally agree with the AFP report. What it should have said is that these infrastructure woes, which worsened over the last four years, have doused cold water on whatever spark of hope for the economy that existed at the beginning of P-Noy’s term.)
‘Deliverable’
THE PPP Center document listed the five infrastructure projects that the Aquino administration is pretty sure would be “deliverable” before its term ends. But, out of the five, only the P15.52-billion Ninoy Aquino International Airport (Naia) Expressway; the P2.01-billion Daang Hari South Luzon Expressway link road (a project of the Department of Public Work and Highways); and the P1.72-billion Automatic Fare Collection System for the two trains systems in Metro Manila would directly benefit its residents.
The two other “deliverable” projects are two school projects worth P20.14 billion. Details about them have yet to be revealed by the PPP Center, however.
This infrastructure accomplishment record is anemic, to say the least, in comparison with the much more robust record chalked up by the much-maligned administration of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA).
Businessmen who were wholeheartedly supportive of P-Noy’s presidency are now saddened by how he squandered his opportunity to build on GMA’s infrastructure legacy. That legacy allowed him to hit the ground running, as far as improving the economy was concerned, when he took over as president, but he blew it.
In an earlier column (“Question for P-Noy: Where’s the infra?”; August 19, 2014, issue of the BusinessMirror), I listed the various infrastructure projects that were completed during GMA’s term, from 2001 to 2009.
The list included new national roads (47,773 kilometers); new bridges (289,944 kms); five new airports, including Naia Terminal 3; the upgrading of airports; 74 airports (upgraded and improved); 584 seaports (new, upgraded and improved, including municipal and roll-on, roll-off ports); 16,567 kms of farm-to-market roads; 1.1 million hectares added to irrigated areas; 102,033 new classrooms; and 9,942 flood-control projects.
(We certainly don’t take pride in pointing out that it was during P-Noy’s term that the Naia earned the dubious honor of being named the worst airport in the world.)
But, as a very supportive business sector would put it, there is still time for the administration to improve on its infrastructure record “to improve the competitiveness of the country’s domestic industries.”
To be concluded on Wednesday
E-mail: omerta_bdc@yahoo.com.