EDITORIAL - Casualty of politics

The conditional cash transfer was one of the laudable programs of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo when she was president. The CCT was developed in Brazil and implemented with success among the poor by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, still hugely popular even as he awaits the runoff for his successor.

It is not accurate to call the program, which in the Philippines is supported by the World Bank, an outright dole-out. The CCT requires certain behaviors from the poor in exchange for direct financial assistance from the government. These include sending children to school, and making women go to health centers for maternal care.

Only politicians whose patronage system is being disrupted by the CCT program can oppose its continuation by the Aquino administration. Arroyo picked a competent social welfare secretary, Esperanza Cabral, a cardiologist who champions women’s reproductive health, to implement the Philippine version of the conditional cash transfers. Social welfare teams fanned out across the country, bypassing local politicians and barangay captains who tended to pad the list of beneficiaries with relatives and friends and, worse, with ghost recipients, to determine for themselves who were truly among the poorest of the poor and deserving of the program.

Arroyo, now a Pampanga congresswoman, once also served as social welfare chief, and she knows how successful the cash transfers were during her administration. Her recent three-hour grilling of the new social welfare chief probably stemmed from her keen knowledge of the subject and her desire to ensure its proper implementation. But it might also have something to do with the fact that the new social welfare secretary, Corazon Soliman, was a member of the so-called Hyatt 10 — Arroyo’s trusted aides who quit her government and demanded her resignation in 2005 over the “Hello, Garci” vote rigging scandal.

Other politicians, most of them interested only in seeing their faces on TV, have jumped in, threatening to abolish the program by cutting off its funding. This would be unfortunate, considering that this is one of the few programs that is truly helping the poor by encouraging certain types of positive behavior. If lawmakers simply don’t like Soliman, they can always reject her at the Commission on Appointments. But the cash transfers should continue, with transparency in its implementation and safeguards against fund misuse. It cannot be a casualty of political warfare.