Cramming

It is a new day — although not necessarily a new fate.

Somehow we always expect the large trends to change when we flip calendars. They do not; but why kill the hopefulness?

According to one survey, 94% of Filipinos are hopeful things will be better in 2014. I recall we had roughly the same figure for hopefulness when we entered 2013, which turned out to be such a disastrous year. Hopefulness, unfortunately, is not a prognosis. It is a testament to our willingness to hack it, whatever challenges confront us.

Over the holiday break, while officially on vacation, it occurred to President Aquino that the better part of his term was wasted water under the bridge. He spoke of being in “the last two minutes” of his tenure — although this might be technically imprecise. He promised to intensify his administration’s efforts in the remaining period.

For three-and-a-half years, we were treated to government by improvisation. There was no clear roadmap for what will be done. There was no timeline for achievement. The only fully quantitative targets set up were for revenue collections. All of them were unmet.

As this administration enters its closing phase, there is a sense nothing was achieved. Only two infra projects were inaugurated by this president: both of them projects of the previous administration.

None of the more notable PPP projects are really off and running. Not one of them will be completed by June 2016.

Only the Mactan airport modernization was successfully bid out last year — and there is controversy over the competence of the consortium that won it. President Aquino promised to have himself run over by a commuter train if the LRT-1 extension project is not done during his term. That project cannot be done by June 2016, having yet to be bid out.

The President’s promise to lie down on the rail will haunt him.

It will haunt him like Mar Roxas’ promise of 3-D CCTV coverage at the airport when he was still DOTC secretary. When a small-town mayor was assassinated at the airport last month, not a single working CCTV camera was there to record the event.

What seems more imminent is the possibility of power scarcity and rotating brownouts by 2015. The reason for this is the failure to attract enough investments into power generation over the last three years. The result is a thin power reserve, the single most important factor explaining the controversial price spike that hit us.

In that forgettable interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in the wake of Typhoon Yolanda, Aquino was asked if government’s (sloppy) handling of this calamity will be his presidency’s legacy. The President sidestepped the pointed question and rambled on about small South Pacific islands threatened with submersion due to global warming.

When Mar Roxas was interviewed in Tacloban by the same network during the frantic days of rescue and relief, he was asked why corpses on the roadside were not being collected. Roxas, in callous denial, claimed they were fresh corpses, different from those seen the day before.

Now we know, nearly two months after the storm, that almost 2,000 corpses remain unburied in Tacloban. That is a horrible and overpowering image. Nothing could be a more compelling indictment of official ineptitude than this little detail.

How, in Heaven’s name, could 2,000 corpses in Tacloban (and probably many more in the smaller towns nearby) be allowed to rot in the sun two months after the calamity? In the unfeeling language of this administration, those corpses are still being “processed.”

In this case, we can no longer blame the victims. The corpses could not reasonably be expected to bury themselves — as our national leaders sort of expected the storm-shocked local governments to spring back to business-as-usual hours after the surge.

The President’s dictate, when he visited Tacloban after the storm, that the living is given priority over the dead have now taken on a more macabre shade. In the area of devastation, the dead are dishonored wholesale.

Let us not even talk about the gory business of “processing” the final casualty count. The ghastly sight of so many unburied corpses threatens to be this administration’s legacy icon, conveying the many things left undone by official (or rather, officious) lethargy.

Obviously, the President does not want the images of Tacloban to be his administration’s legacy. Although he might have difficulty finding other icons of achievement, he is obviously fretting over the matter of “legacy.” This is the reason he now speaks about his administration’s “last two minutes.”

His mother had an eventful but underachieving presidency. When Cory Aquino faced her own “last two minutes,” she had her efficient public works secretary Ping de Jesus work triply hard to build all those flyovers dotting the metropolis. They were monuments to her rule more than solid foundations for future economic growth.

Now we are again in danger of facing another flurry of cosmetic monuments erected to camouflage strategic underachievement. This is all a cramming administration can do.

All the cosmetic monuments will not reverse the larger trends. Our economy will not suddenly become investment-led rather than consumption-driven. They will not make us an exporting economy rather than one reliant on remittances. They will not bring us to a job-generating, poverty-reducing growth path. They will not close the infra gap, widen the capital market or dramatically improve inter-island logistics.

Alas, another underachieving administration can on only have monuments to bank on for legacy-building.