By Artchil B. Fernandez
The Philippines is officially in a recession! For the first time in thirty years, the gross domestic product (GDP) of the country contracted. Second quarter GDP this year shrunk by an astounding negative 16.5 percent.
The Covid-19 pandemic is not only snuffing out the lives of Filipinos, it is also wrecking the country’s economy. Around 11 million Filipino families are now hit hard by unemployment. Data from the Department of Labor and Employment (Dole) reveal that 137,000 overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) lost their jobs.
Jollibee, the country’s largest fast-food chain reported a net loss of 12 billion pesos. The fast-food company recently announced that it is closing 255 branches all-over the country. The plight of Jollibee clearly illustrates the dire economic situation of the country.
While the economies of all countries in the world contracted due to the pandemic, not all suffered equally. Thailand’s economy shrank between 4.8 to 6 percent while Malaysia’s economy which was projected to contract by second quarter this year actually grew by 0.7 percent. In Southeast Asia, the Philippine economy took the worst beating at – 16.5 percent.
Covid-19 pandemic affects the entire planet but its impact on each country varies. What primarily accounts for the variation of the pandemic’s effect among the countries in the world both in the cost of human lives and economic performance is the national leadership of the country.
A country with competent leadership handles the health and economic crises better than a country led by an inept and lazy leadership. In these dark times, leadership really does matter.
Countries like New Zealand, Taiwan, and South Korea for example managed the health crisis better largely due to their decisive and pro-active leadership. The United States and Brazil, on the other hand, the top two countries in the world with the highest cases of Covid-19 infections are led by incompetent and narrow-minded populists.
The Philippines performs badly in handling and managing the health and economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic mainly due to incompetent and inept leadership of Du30. As much as Du30 tries hard to evade responsibility by claiming that the pandemic is not his own making, the fact that other countries fare batter than the Philippines in fighting the pandemic is a testament to the failure of his leadership. The evidence indicting Du30’s incompetence keeps on piling-up every day.
The Philippines in its worst economic performance (-16.5 percent) in three decades is among the latest proofs of Du30’s epic failure to manage and handle the pandemic. On the health front, the country recorded its highest Covid-19 infections in a day with 6,958 cases last August 11, 2020. As of this writing, there are now 143, 749 cases of Covid-19 in the country and the figure continue to go up at an alarming rate.
Lack of a comprehensive plan or blueprint on how the country confronts the pandemic is the most glaring confirmation of Du30’s leadership failure. He publicly told the nation that he will only draw up a comprehensive plan once a vaccine is developed and this is an appalling abdication of responsibility.
The most basic way to handle the pandemic, the Three Ts (trace, test, treat), was done by the present administration in a haphazard and fragmented way. Du30 demonstrated his incompetence by appointing a testing czar and a tracing czar, wrongly thinking that a thickened bureaucratic layer will help fight the pandemic.
In the case of contact tracing, until now there is no comprehensive tracing strategy from the national down to the local level despite having a czar on this. The sad truth is contact tracing mechanism does not exist in most localities all over the country, contributing to the difficulties of health workers in fighting the pandemic.
Aside from missing the tracing mechanism, Du30 also has no strategy on how to open the economy while ensuring that Covid-19 does not contaminate factories and industries. Du30 simply left the job to employers without national guidelines on how to do this. The absence of a national plan and leaving employers and workers to fend themselves off led to the spike of infections in many factories and industries in the Calabarzon area.
Due to the absence comprehensive plan or blueprint, the country is now locked in an ECQ-MECQ-GCQ-MGCQ cycle. The economy opens, infections spike, government imposes lockdown to lower infections, the economy opens, a flare-up of infections, lockdown – the cycle keeps on repeating and repeating. This is the tragedy of incompetence and failure of national leadership.
Crippling economic crisis and soaring cases of infections, these are the price of incompetence. Filipinos paid a steep price for entrusting the leadership of the land to an incompetent and rogue populist. Incompetent leadership extracts a heavy price especially in times of crisis. The country is now paying a high price in terms of human lives and economic shambles due to the ineptness of national leadership.
Worst, Du30 is throwing in the towel. “I am between the devil and the deep blue sea,” Du30 told the nation in his taped late-night show this week to excuse his ineptness. How the nation wiggles its way out or navigates between the devil and deep blue sea is the challenge of leadership in this dark hour. A true leader can always find a way out in tight and tough situations. In the Battle of Gaugamela, Alexander the Great was also between the devil and the deep blue sea but his brilliant strategy and battle plan enabled his 47,000 troops to strike a decisive victory against 86,000 Persians.