No money yet?

There is one simple reason why hecklers of GMA’s impressive infrastructure program unveiled at her last SONA are continuing to hound her and her economic managers to show them the money: So far, neither GMA nor those managers have.

Without the money, the hecklers observe, that super-ambitious program may crash and burn in another heap of familiar and repeatedly broken dreams. They may be better purveyors of hard-nosed statistics than amateur poetry, but they’ve got a point. No money, no honey, as they say, and it’s small consolation that Gary Teves, Romy Neri and Rolly Andaya seem more forthcoming with expressions of confidence than with straightforward identifications of fund sources.

It does seem clear, though, that not all of the money will come from the national budget. Rather, according to the easily annoyed but studiedly patient economic whiz Joey Salceda, the funding will come from the budget, government-owned and controlled corporations, local governments and the private sector. Joey and others add that the government will tap low-cost official development assistance from various countries.

None of this fund-raising will come from new taxes to be imposed on the people, Joey assures. To stress the point, he has exclaimed, "Read my lips, no new taxes!" I hope he’s more prescient than the first George Bush who won a presidential campaign in the United States largely on that promise. A few years later, when in power, people read his lips again, but this time they were saying, "More taxes." George W’s dad, as we all know, turned out to be a one-term occupant of the White House.

On the other hand, it’s "only" Joey saying this, not his one-time professor at the Ateneo. Because she isn’t saying anything, the same hecklers suspect a deniability game in progress. One skeptic is Peter Wallace who "seriously doubts" the funds are there. Says the long-time Philippine resident and respected analyst: "Five years with no funds doesn’t suddenly change overnight."

Moreover, Peter notes, the Philippines happens to have spent the lowest for infrastructure among major countries of Asia in the years 2000-2003, a niggardly 2 percent of Gross Domestic Product, as compared with India (2.9 percent), Thailand (3.4 percent), China (4.2 percent), Indonesia (9.1 percent) and Malaysia (9.9 percent). Still, Wallace made clear at our Viewpoints program on ANC last Friday, GMA’s emphasis on infrastructure is the way to go. But, he qualifies cogently, "it must be funded."

Time now for the booster section to have its say: I too agree that, one, we must keep trust in our ability as a nation to compete and to win, just like Manny Pacquiao, our Mt. Everest climbers and victorious athletes at the SEA Games and, two, we should give GMA a chance rather than quit now before we’ve even started.

Must we forever think like wimps and the perennial doormat of our better-performing Asian neighbors? Clearly not, we bellow, to the deafening yells of our back-up bleacher sections.

Now for the usual reality check, which we often neglect in the afterglow of having been identified by GMA at the SONA as one of the nation’s "winners": Getting a comprehensive infrastructure program implemented, within the time frame specified by the President, which is by the time she steps down in 2010, isn’t the easiest of undertakings, even in the best of times. And these are not the best of times.

Arguably, we should have been getting these projects done over the last several years, rather than cram them into the little less than four years remaining in the President’s term of office. It’s easy to say better late than never, but this happens to be a different ball of wax altogether.

At issue is not really our Faith in the Filipino, or belief in ourselves as a people, or commitment to the notion that our country can be as great as we once were (Wallace says, fearlessly or recklessly betraying his real age, that when he began living in this country, the Philippines was ranked second in the region. I’ve only read about those times. Never got to experience how it felt.)

Probably nothing, but nothing, will test the ability of this nation to implement to realization the best laid-out plans and the loftiest visions. How many times has it been said that no one can draft detailed plans as well our home-grown experts. If that was the only gauge of growth, we’d be right up there with the rest of the region’s tigers.

It’s when implementation time comes around that the room empties. The fugitives have likely retreated to more hospitable climes abroad where, naturally, they get the chance to translate their dreams into reality, and get paid handsomely in the process.

That’s why it’s a bit worrisome when people like former Budget Secretary and University of the Philippines economics professor Benjamin Diokno, Dr. Raul Fabella, current dean of the UP School of Economics, and former Economic Planning Secretary and chair of the Institute for Development and Econometric Analysis Cayetano Paderanga regale the Agence France Presse with their skepticism that GMA and her economic honchos will be able to show the money.

One can, of course, dismiss Diokno, Fabella and Paderanga as mere ivory-tower academics. But Diokno and Paderanga, at least, have had stints in government. My assumption is that they can winnow hard fact from pure fiction, or the true historical figures from the projections and estimates. They’ve been there and done that. When they say the money ain’t there, now or, for some of them, forevermore, I have to listen.

Then there are those who question that we have the plans and, more important, the bureaucracy to see the gargantuan projects through. Others, like those who scoff at Build-Operate-Transfer projects are convinced that this government is too populist, too focused on political survival, to ever attract BOT proponents.

BOT investors fret about rate levels they find conducive to sink their money into the country. Other countries competing for those funds can offer iron-clad contracts and hassle-free rates and tolls levels which guarantee them their projected incomes. Our inability to assure a profitable income stream, plus the real risk of project delays and derailments brought about by litigation, are among the factors which have turned off the private sector.

Still, if I had my druthers, I’d rather those projects laid down by the President at the SONA were in place, than they weren’t. But while I have as much faith in the Filipino as anyone, I have to wonder whether the pencil-pushing that was undoubtedly done before the SONA was informed by realism or by political imperatives.