PNoy is Naked!

Although I support President Noynoy Aquino especially in his determined drive to hold accountable those who pillaged and caused injury to our country, there are some things which I hope he will take a second look at because they only make him like the emperor who walked around in a supposedly magic new clothes.

First is his campaign slogan "Kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap". While this may have struck a chord with the voting public, this is an erroneous thinking that does not do much to solve neither corruption nor poverty.

Corruption may exacerbate the effects of poverty but it is not poverty's main creating mechanism. Poverty is the absence of wealth and there are two reasons how this can be so. One is that the capacity of people, for whatever reason, to generate wealth is low. The other is that the wealth that people generate is unjustly denied or inequitably shared among them. By harping on the notion that corruption causes poverty - and not for other reasons like low productivity, ignorance, contractualization, capital flight etc., the President fails to squarely face the problem of poverty and do something concrete about it.

On the other hand, the President's idea of fighting corruption is limited to procedural tightening and running after those who have committed such a crime. Again, while this effort is laudable, it does not look into the roots of corruption which is the mentality of rent and entitlement. This mentality is so deeply rooted and so widespread that it afflicts almost all Filipinos. Those who are afflicted with the rent and entitlement mentality have no understanding of how wealth is made and have a shaky moral foundation with regards to obtaining money.

Second item that I hope the President reconsiders is his campaign promise of "transformational change". For me this phrase is bull. By itself, change alone, for as long as it is positive is already enough. Why try to sound more profound with a redundancy? I hope the President realizes that those who foisted to him this phrase are merely performing verbal shamanism on him and taking him for a ride. What can these people really achieve that can not simply be called change? But of course they get to hold good jobs and a Rasputinian influence.

Last item that I hope that the President will revisit is the claim he once made that our Department of Science and Technology had virtually conquered dengue with their mosquito ovitrap invention. While he was made to make glowing claims about this in several public occasions, I have talked to some people in places where this device was tried and who said that they could not really tell if they work. Proof that the claim may be hollow is that the use of these contraption have not become widespread. The DOST is one government agency that really needs to be changed ... or transformed.

I do not know if the President will see things my way, but from where I stand, looking at the President's three "robes", I can see that he is naked.