Her none too secret fears

E·N·Q·U·I·R·Y
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL

Her none too secret fears
Sunday, 01 30, 2005

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown - especially if the crown is undeserved and had been invested on its wearer in indecent haste, for fear of exposing the web of trickery, manipulation and wholesale abuse of the perks of power that accompanied its acquisition. This niggling fear will always accompany the days and nights of presumptive President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, even as she whoops out an exuberant unpresidential “Yahoo!” on the recent appreciation of the peso against the dollar.

This niggling fear will stay with her even as she savors the clear prospect of the passage at the Senate of the bill increasing the value-added tax, a bill which through her intimidating insistence passed through the House of Representatives with the smoothness of a knife cutting through butter.

This niggling fear will transform itself from a persistent, irritating anxiety into a full-blown dread when she begins to hear the outraged cries, steadily rising to a crescendo, of the poor and the lower middle class, as they find themselves squirming from the pinch of intensified poverty, as the prices of basic goods increase. Absent the necessary safety nets, this piece of hasty, cosmetic legislation will only fry the taxpayers in another deep vat (pardon the horrible pun) of economic woes.

It will not help to remind her that for all the years of her governance, the quality of life, whether personal or national, has worsened for a great majority of the people. Only a little more than a tenth of the population - to these belong a few who made money the old-fashioned, honorable way, and a considerable number who made money in new, more creatively corrupt and dishonest ways - could claim that their personal quality of life has improved.

Against this ratio is more than 60 percent of the population - the hopeless poor, the struggling middle class, as well as the hopeful riffraff - who think that the personal quality of their lives has gone from bad to worse and would probably turn to the worst, without any prospect of getting any better. As regards the national quality of life, an alarming 75 percent of the population is of the conviction that life in the country is really down in the pits; only 4 percent think it has improved.

Translation: the deep shit that the country is now in - despite the claimed 6 percent economic growth last year and last week’s packaged new loans amounting to $1.5 billion through a 25-year bond offering – might as well be described using Arroyo’s much ballyhooed economics Ph.D. - meaning, Piled high and Deeper.

Even as she puts on a happy face, Arroyo will always be hounded by the niggling fear that the Presidential Electoral Tribunal ruling in the separate protest of Loren Legarda in the vice-presidential race would likewise hold true in the substitution case being pursued by Susan Roces. All she has to do to put this fear to rest - and erase for the nonce the perception that she stole the elections - is make a recount of those votes possible. If she is proven as the real winner, then that would, to her glory, establish her legitimacy and forever silence her detractors. Her reluctance to have those ballot boxes reopened reinforces the stigma cast on her presidency.

Easily, the most honest thing Arroyo can do for herself - and the rest of a cynical nation - is to make it easier for the people to accept that the canvass was fair and square. But then, as everyone would care to remember, it was done with the speed of people skating on thin ice. As they say, people who skate over thin ice insure their survival in their speed; otherwise, they sink.

Arroyo, too, undoubtedly gets that sinking feeling when she starts to consider that in a survey on governance, the respondents who were asked to grade her performance - on a scale of 0 to 100, where 100 is a perfect score, 90 is very good, 80 is good, 75 is pasang awa or an act of mercy, and a grade below 75 is a failure - gave her an average nationwide grade of 64. Only 14 percent of the respondents gave her a grade of 80 or higher, 23 percent gave her a pasang awa, and the rest (63 percent) completely thumbed her down.

And here’s the salt on the wound: the most exacting (and thereby honest) of her evaluators, the ones who thought that the quality of mercy is never strained, are the civil servants. Could this explain the resignations that regularly plague her Cabinet? On a wider scale, are we meant to construe a clear rebuke there? A respected columnist has an explanation: government workers are more in contact with her, directly or indirectly, and perhaps familiarity breeds contempt. Or is it a case of the pot calling the kettle black?

Blacker still, and bigger and longer, will grow the shadows of Arroyo’s fears when she discovers that the sin tax law, the lateral attrition law and the soon to be enacted law increasing the value-added tax will not rake in the projected revenues, mainly because of the endemic climate of dishonesty and corruption in her government. The figures in the expected tax take are cosmetically bloated, mere window display, to pull a snow job over the international ratings firms. When collection time comes around, the usual creativity and ingenuity will be at work (in both the taxpayer and the collector) in this climate of corruption to bring about as much as a 30 percent leakage.

And this time around, the sighs of the poor and the middle class, the murmur of the disgruntled ranks in the military, and the chants of militant groups will rise to a combined, deafening intensity that will instill real, palpable fear in the heart of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. But she need not be alarmed. After all, these are just articulated, reasonable, justifiable terrors that might paralyze the will she needs to redeem herself and save the country.

What she has to fear the most is when silence descends all over the land, the terrifying silence that preludes the perfect storm.

For comments about this website:Webmaster@tribune.net.ph

The Daily Tribune © 2005