Yesterday, September 1, was the Social Security System’s 59th anniversary. Unlike before, this year’s anniversary came and went without the usual proud celebration and merrymaking of its employees and officials.
How could they?
Only last Sunday or the start of the week of its anniversary, SSS was “named and shamed” by President Digong Duterte’s newly-established Hotline 8888 when the Civil Service Commission director for Public Assistance and Information, Liz Agamata, released its initial results showing SSS with the highest share of complaints from August 1 and 24.
The CSC director simply confirmed our often-repeated assertion that SSS has been providing us with poor quality service for some time now.
No, the complaints had nothing to do with the P2,000 pension increase that we, two million pensioners, had been waiting for.
According to her, “most of the complaints were regarding the slow pace of transactions, the failure of agencies to act on requests due to missing signatories, discourtesy of some staff, and the presence of fixers.”
She tried to be diplomatic by explaining that “the SSS rank in the list is not surprising, considering that it has millions of clients.” Moreover, “SSS has the fastest response to complaints out of all government agencies.”
For us SSS members and pensioners, her defense of SSS was pathetic and unacceptable. It was a condonation of its ineptitude.
Instead, she should have required SSS to undergo CSC’s Service Delivery Excellence Program and conduct “service improvement workshops and facilitation for increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the service office’s strategies, structure, staff, and systems.”
Did she want us to simply grin and bear the hardship in transacting with SSS, and in not getting the P2,000 pension increase?
No, we will not surrender our right to receive from SSS world-class quality service and adequate pensions.
Who wouldn’t be inspired to keep on demanding them, considering President Digong’s success on his ongoing Herculean task of eliminating the illegal drugs menace?
At least 3 million of our population have been addicted to these drugs—mostly shabu or methamphetamine—yet some would still not admit the great extent of their damage to the lives of our present and future generations.
Some who had known the cold-blooded notoriety and devilish generosity of drug lords had chosen the convenient path of least resistance, having probably conceded that since they “can’t lick them,” they had decided to “join them.”
They are our political leaders and law enforcers who had cooperated, coddled and protected drug lords, even if they are already inside our prison walls.
But finally, we have voted wisely as president a true leader —then-Mayor Digong—who is now showing everybody how to combat illegal drugs by waging a war against all small-time users, pushers and dealers, bigtime drug lords, scalawag policemen, corrupt judges, and narco-politicians.
This war—which most of us now also consider our own—has become so successful that it has resulted in the surrender of no less than 600 thousand drug users in barely two months. Unfortunately, it had also caused the death of nearly two thousand, which included policemen and innocent civilians, but mostly suspected drug pushers, dealers and drug lords who fought back while being arrested.
Not surprising, those who have opposed the President in the last elections are resurfacing as his most vocal critics alongside local and international human rights advocates.
But the once-overwhelming and irreversible addiction of Filipinos to illegal drugs is being solved through our all-out war against them under a true leader with popular national support, and who employs Herculean efforts that critics equate with “extra-judicial killings.”
The same could be done with the SSS pension system.
A year before it turns 60 years old, we ask: where do we want SSS to go to?
We could leave it to drift aimlessly providing poor quality service and inadequate pensions to degenerate into uselessness and irrelevance.
We could do nothing, while lazily and uncaringly pretending to undertake endless actuarial studies as we keep worrying unnecessarily about striking a balance between the interests of contributing employers and employees with those of non-contributing and current pensioners.
We could do this without minding that today’s contributors will someday become pensioners receiving the same worthless pensions, not even caring that today’s SSS minimum pension of P1,200 couldn’t even buy Mang Pandoy his poor man’s meal of a kilo of NFA rice and galunggong fish for 10 days.
Merely granting that P2,000 pension increase is not enough of a solution. Without additional funding, it would only accelerate the bankruptcy of SSS.
The only correct way to make SSS relevant again is by freeing up its present salary base of P16,000 to the actual salary, and by raising its total contribution rate from 11 to 21 percent. Implemented gradually over 20 years, they would also improve the adequacy of its pensions.
This is not even close to waging a war against the proponents of inadequate pensions. It is simply adopting for the private-sector members of SSS the pension system that government employees have been enjoying from the Government Service Insurance System since Jan. 1, 2003.