Belmonte: Time to stop doles, start investing

Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO / LEO M. SABANGAN II

MANILA, Philippines—With 18 months remaining of the Aquino administration, Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. believes it’s time the government shifts gears in its antipoverty programs and moves from doles to investments to create more jobs.

Belmonte aired his belief amid the Commission on Audit’s adverse findings on the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s (DSWD) conditional cash transfer (CCT) program and the rise in self-rated poverty to its worst level in the last eight years.

“It is time to concentrate on economic policies for the poor, including greater competition and amending economic provisions to lure long-term job-creating investments,” Belmonte said in a text message.

The Speaker is pushing for the enactment of the National Competition Policy bill and a joint resolution to amend economic provisions of the Constitution and increase foreign investment caps.

Polling firm Social Weather Stations reported that 54 percent of Filipinos, or 11.4 million households, rated themselves poor in 2014, the highest number since 2006.

The self-rated poverty threshold—or what respondents considered the monthly income that would get them out of poverty—surged to P20,000 in the fourth quarter last year from P15,000 in the third quarter.

Cagayan de Oro Rep. Rufus Rodriguez said he would call for a reassessment of the government’s antipoverty strategy in order to look for an alternative to the CCT which has not brought economic growth to the grassroots.

“This is alarming, something must be wrong somewhere, whether it is management or the policy itself. We have invested billions and we will invest more in 2015 and yet we have no results,” Rodriguez said in a phone interview.

Gabriela Rep. Luzviminda Ilagan said the CCT, or the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), started by former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2008 and continued by President Aquino was a massive failure.

“Haven’t we been saying from the very start that the CCT is not the answer to poverty?” Ilagan said.

She chided the government for continuing the CCT despite mounting evidence that it was not achieving its goal of spreading the wealth to the poor.

“The CCT was a failure in South America—why did we copy it? It was riddled with anomalies even during its first year—why was it continued with an increase in budget? The surveys showed corruption on the ground, the COA report validated this, yet P-Noy defended it and even asked for more funds in the supplemental budget,” Ilagan said.

Congress approved nearly P65 billion for the CCT in 2015, or more than three times the P21 billion in the first year of the Aquino administration.

Ilagan said the poor needed jobs, not alms. What made the CCT’s failure more damning was that self-rated poverty had worsened while the Philippine economy soared to new heights in the same period. “The economic growth he (President) boasts of is not inclusive,” she said.

In its annual audit report on the department released last week, the COA said the DSWD handed out more than P1 billion in 2013 to about 364,000 families whose names were “missing” from the CCT database, to government employees and Filipinos working abroad, and made double payments to people whose names appeared on the list twice.

Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman said the DSWD had answered fully all of the COA’s questions on the CCT, and blamed the audit agency for not including its answers in the 2013 report.

Isabela Rep. Rodolfo Albano III said that despite the SWS data and the anomalies uncovered by the COA, the CCT was a success because it made government aid more concrete to the poor.

“The beneficiaries actually hold in their hands the means to directly support their family and keep their children in school. Moreover, they have access to universal health care and livelihood opportunities. For the recipients, improving their lives is no longer a dream but a reality,” Albano said.