State of the State

LAST Wednesday was the last day for the submission of applications to take the University of the Philippines (UP) College Admission Test (Upcat). At the main campus in Diliman, Quezon City, my office is a stone's throw away from the admissions' office so I've been able to observe the last-minute rush.

I use "rush" intentionally to describe scenes closer to what you'd expect when a new gold mine is discovered. There was a huge crowd of high school students as well as parents and I could feel their hopes as well as anxieties. One mother approached me for help, with her face showing disappointment and then panic, when I explained that she needed four ID photographs of her son. She had only two.

Remember this was only the application phase, the first step in a long process. The entrance exams will be administered in a few weeks, and the results will come out a few months later. The day the results are released, there will be very emotional scenes.

The crowds around the admissions' office -- mostly from middle- and low-income families -- remind me how important "gobyerno" [government] is to so many Filipinos. UP is, after all, "gobyerno," part of a huge State (and I use the capital letter "s" to emphasize it as one institution) machine that's supposed to respond to the needs of some 85 million Filipinos.

Failed state?

We like to flog ourselves complaining about how nothing works in the country. If we are to believe ourselves, this country has broken down completely: no peace, no order, no future.

Out in the streets, the perception (and this is borne out by the public opinion polls) is that we have a weak, maybe even failed State. The President's approval ratings have been in the subzero range for months now and government agencies are in tight competition with each other for the highest dishonor when it comes to inefficiency and corruption.

And the solution to this quagmire? It's not surprising that we succumb to the temptation of prevailing neoliberal economic ideology, one which the President herself religiously subscribes to: since the State is so inefficient, then we should just reduce its roles and turn over the country's affairs to the private sector.

Paradoxically, the President and her advisers call for less government and yet keep imposing new taxes. People complain because while the burden of taxes gets heavier, we seem to get short-changed even more because the State's services keep getting reduced.

I propose that at this point in our nation's development, what we need is to build on the State's strengths -- and there are many.

The scenes around UP's admissions' office hint of what could be. For all the complaints about UP and some (note, some) state universities, they are the only hope for access to quality tertiary education for many Filipinos. This is not empty boasting from a UP professor -- we have the evidence with the results of licensure exams showing that for all professions, UP graduates generally have a much higher percentage of passers than those of private schools. (Perversely, because our graduates are so good they also end up being exported in greater numbers.)

And yet we have to turn away many applicants. The budget shrinks each year, and faculty members take heavier teaching loads as fellow teachers move to private schools with higher pay ... or to jobs overseas.

Similarly, it is our government health care system -- from the Philippine General Hospital (PGH) down to the rural health unit -- that often spells the difference between life and death. Again, one can complain about inefficiency and incompetence in many of these units, but the system shows what could be. PGH, for example, remains the premiere medical institution and training grounds for the doctors who will eventually go into lucrative practice in the private hospitals, here and overseas.

Lifelines

The State is the sole provider of many lifelines, and given a choice, people actually choose government institutions. The reasons aren't just economic. Between a jeepney and the overhead light rail system, I'll take the latter. The Light Rail Transit (LRT) and Metro Rail Transit (MRT) exemplify what the State could be if it could mobilize its financial and human capital. We wish the LRT/MRT had more lines, more train coaches, in the same way we wish there were more UP campuses and higher admission quotas, more government housing units, more government hospital beds. People know what the State's potential is. If we were convinced the State would do more good, then we'd cough up some of the P85 billion that the Bureau of Internal Revenue estimates to be unpaid. That's almost equal to the Department of Health's budget for six years.

Maybe too, our public memory tends to be too short and our perceptions too selective. We don't see and appreciate the lives transformed by an education in one of our state universities. Or the difference a government housing unit can mean for family life. A recent Washington Post article gives high marks to the efforts of Ombudsman Simeon Marcelo to crack down on government corruption. The article surprised me not just because it's so rare for Western newspapers to feature good news about the Philippines but also because I realized how little our own papers have said about Marcelo's lonely crusade.

The President

In many ways, we are conditioned to be negative toward the State. When political will is exerted, the public response is at best one of nonchalance. More often, we actually get more resentment and cynicism.

Think of the recent miraculous crackdown on the "jueteng" numbers racket. I was skeptical at first, but I've asked around and actually interviewed some of the "cobradors" [bet collectors] who glumly tell me all operations have stopped... although they will smile when I ask how long this will hold.

I get similar smiles when I ask around about kidnapping. The Chinese-Filipino community's generally satisfied about the drop in kidnapping but some smile uneasily too when I ask how long this respite will be.

My heart sinks when I see the smiles, realizing that when the State does display its power -- in cracking down on jueteng, for example -- we actually get a glimpse of the horrifying truth, that the "power" here is derived from criminal syndicates having hijacked the State's officials and their relatives. The State can stop jueteng because it runs jueteng. Take that logic a step further: the State can't stop the drug abuse problem because it does not want to, because too many of our officials and law "enforcers" profit from having more drug addicts, much more so than with jueteng or kidnapping. The power of the State to do good has been co-opted for great evil, its apparatus transformed into one massive "hulidap" [police extortion] operation.

Soft state? Weak state? Failed state? No, we have a powerful State capable of doing great good, or great evil. And the overwhelming malaise we all feel these days comes from trying to figure out where the President fits in this scheme of things.