“Sell government assets where buyers are disinterested if not at bargain basement prices, or substantially moderate the greed?”
THE City of Manila is in the “financial ICU,” declared its newly returned mayor as he delivered the State of the City upon his inauguration.
His hand-picked predecessor, to whom he entrusted the reins of City Hall in 2022 after his much-admired three-year stint not only slept on the job, but apparently left the city bankrupt.
I use the word “bankrupt” figuratively, because Manila under “Yorme” Isko Moreno will surely bounce back to financial health, and continue his vision of providing, at the very least, the MBN or “minimum basic needs” of his more than 2 million city dwellers and another 2 million who work in the city but reside in its environs.
Still, the gory details of the state of the city’s finances and the almost inexplicable chicanery and management foolhardiness that brought the capital of the nation to its feet is mind-boggling, too many to write about in a single article.
Aside from the urgent task of cleaning up the detritus that littered the “kabisera ng bansa,” a visual hallmark that characterized the dying days of the Lacuna administration, we await the “straws in the wind” the Yorme will do next, to make officials accountable and, furthermore, to nurse the city to recovery.
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Yet the capital is a mirror of the true state of the nation.
As of April this year, the NG’s indebtedness has reached P16.75 trillion, up by 3.96 trillion in the first two years and four months of the BbM administration, compared to his imprisoned predecessor who left him a “legacy debt” of 12.79 trillion at the end of his term.
Duterte borrowed P6.8 trillion, as the parsimonious PNoy left him with almost 6 trillion in debt. Examining the debt in detail, we see that most of it was incurred during the pandemic, when, for two full years, the economy was at a standstill due to the pandemic.
We were operating on various degrees of lockdown with severe economic impacts, and we have yet to fully recover, unlike our regional neighbors.
In 2019, the national debt stood at 7.73 trillion, an increase of 1.78 trillion from PNoy’s 2016, which however jumpstarted the Build Build Build infrastructure programs of Duterte, most of which which BbM now inaugurates with attendant fanfare.
But with COVID 19, we had to borrow 2 trillion to sustain government operations and another 2 trillion in 2021, plus one more trillion in the first half of 2022.
Keeping the population alive and feeding the marginalized at a time when the economy was shut down costs plenty, yet the Duterte government was able to accomplish many infrastructure projects.
The BbM government tweaked Build Build Build into Build Better More, pursuing a personality cult that identifies every undertaking for the resurrected “caudillo,” but there is little to show after three years.
The mountain heaved, but produced a tiny mouse.
At the rate this government is borrowing more and more to finance unsustainable but useless spending on “ayuda” and larceny-graced pork barrel entitlements of the uber-greedy legislators, BbM’s government will graduate in June 30, 2028 leaving us in hock by 21 trillion pesos, maybe more.
With very few FDI’s bringing capital to our shores (and fewer tourists too), with persistent and intractable headline inflation hounding us all, with our balance of trade ballooning negatively as imports continue to outpace exports, and the insatiable greed of officialdom that sucks every penny from the “kaban ng bayan,” Duterte’s 12.79 trillion legacy will have increased by 63 percent or 8.21 trillion more.
That in turn will be BbM’s legacy debt to whoever — be it Inday Sara, his first cousin Martin, one of the Tulfo brothers, Chiz, Leni or Risa or Bam for the pinklawan cult, Baguio’s Magalong, even BbM dark horses like Johnvic or Vince.
Meanwhile, DOF’s Ralph Recto has to find ways and means to finance the 2026 budget, which the DBCC announced as a whopping 6.793 trillion despite his absence as head of the economic management team, an increase of 441 billion from 2025’s What can Recto do? The BIR and Customs (with its newly minted Ariel Nepomuceno heading it), can only cough up 4.21 trillion in revenues in 2026, while GOCC dividends and other revenues can at best produce another 700 billion to make for 4.9 trillion, leaving a gap of 1.9 trillion.
Straws in the wind: Utang pa more; sell government assets where buyers are disinterested if not at bargain basement prices, or substantially moderate the greed?
Betcha by golly wow!, to borrow from a 70s Stylistics song, it won’t be the last option.