Post mortem

The President, over the weekend, ordered the ZTE-NBN deal suspended. For all intents and purposes, the deal is dead.

I imagine the decision to scrap this deal was taken much earlier. But the delicate work of diplomatic back-channeling needed to be done first. After all, the President is due to see China’s leaders next week to seal an additional $8.5 billion in development assistance from that country.

That assistance package, if only for its magnitude, is crucial to the national interest. Along with private investment inflows, income from the several mining start-ups, a hefty increase in our tourism, rising remittances and government’s own investments in infrastructure, we could be confident the national economy could be grown at the 8% level in the near term.

That will lift our economy to a higher growth plane and make poverty alleviation take firm hold. The conservative Asian Development Bank has, itself, raised growth projections for our national economy substantially higher than government’s own estimates.

Those who butter their bread by predicting chronic stagnation for our economy can go to hell.

Of course, we can blow everything off the board by simply unleashing the furies of our habitually destructive politics. That is too easy to do.

For instance, a few conspirators last week tried to exploit the frenzy over the ZTE scandal to unseat the House Speaker. They were so totally blinded by the narrowest of factional interests, they were willing to cause the unraveling of the dominant coalition and open the door to even greater political unpredictability.

Unseating the House Speaker, using as pretext the testimony of his son about a truly crummy deal, is a stupid idea. It would have succeeded only in portraying the ruling coalition as some sort of mafia, eliminating anyone who broke the code of silence among wrongdoers. It would have resulted in sparking an awesome political backlash whose course could not be commanded and whose final, unwarranted toll would burn everyone.

The biggest loser in this botched deal is, as usual, all of us. Given the height of passions and the depth of prejudices fostered by the NBN scandal, it would now seem politically impossible for government to properly invest in developing our information infrastructure.

In this information age, the best subsidies government can make is towards equalizing public access to information. By advancing on e-governance, we will benefit the poor above all else.

The digital divide in not just something that makes countries unequal. The digital divide separates the rich and the poor more dramatically within individual economies. That divide can only be bridged by well-conceived public investments in information infrastructure.

The stinking ZTE deal discredited not only the project. It discredited the entire program of e-government. Note that suspended along with the ZTE deal was the Cyber Education project, probably the last great hope for saving our rotten educational system and producing the quality of manpower we need to thrive in the information age.

That stinking deal causes us to lose time, opportunity and, possibly, public support for leapfrogging our national development through superior e-governance. It has brought out the Luddites to play, along with vested corporate interests, political conspirators and rumor-mongers of every stripe.

On this scandal feast only the maggots.

Even the vastly more civilized second Senate hearing on the doomed ZTE deal was not at all encouraging for anyone who wants our future course re-imagined. Not one senator seemed willing or capable of discussing context and horizon. Not one senator was willing to court losing the television audience by distinguishing between deal and program.

There are, to be sure, issues to be sorted about executive agreements, the renovation of the BOT law and the transparency of contracts. But just as important, we should also be discussing our digital future.

Sen. Roxas, for instance, took issue with cost estimates of present communications formats. But he completely missed considering the possible intensive applications of information that a public broadband backbone could provide and which present commercial providers might not be interested in doing because they are not profitable to do — including those applications we could not yet imagine such as delivering instructional materials online and providing our farmers market intelligence.

He plays to the gallery by saying we need more classrooms ahead of broadband capacity. That panders to old brick-and-mortar notions about what ails our educational system.

It is easy to build classrooms. All Congress has to do is to devote a year’s pork barrel to address the shortage. There is excess classroom capacity in the private schools that can be utilized if government distributed vouchers to the needy but qualified.

What is more difficult is to quickly raise the quality of instruction available to the existing classrooms. Our existing textbooks are rotten. Our teaching personnel in perilously short supply. We will need a decade and billions to retrain them. The quickest, and ultimately cheapest, method is to deliver educational material in digital packages, upgrade in real time.

Otherwise, by simply increasing classrooms and not raising the quality of educational content, we will just be producing more trash.

Forget about the ZTE deal. It will be more productive for our young and our poor if we begin fretting about our digital future. Will the Senate do that even if it is not as sexy as muckraking?