The promise of a Covid-19 vaccine is enough reason to give us hope this Christmas. There may be less food, the Christmas tree may be bare of the usual gifts around it and there may be an empty chair as we gather around the dining table. The saddest part of Christmas is celebrating the traditional noche buena and media noche this holiday season with a missing family member. Nothing has prepared us for the loss of a son, daughter, parent or grandparent due to the coronavirus. Despite this, there is no stopping Christmas. With or without an RFID sticker, Santa’s sleigh full of gifts will breeze through Nlex and Slex. Christendom will celebrate the birth of the Child Jesus with the collective wish that the scourge will soon be over with the coming new year.
We are gripped by a financial panic since the pandemic hit us the likes of which we have not experienced before. We are into a deep recession, loan defaults have been highest in 7 years, credits are tightening despite the low interest rate at historic levels, businesses are plummeting, large and small companies are retrenching and job losses are mounting. Foreign direct investments are significantly reduced. Business expansions are deferred, if not totally called off. With the economy down and with declining revenues, businesses have contracted, if not completely shuttered. Borrowers fall behind their mortgages and credit card payments. There is hardly any purchase of new homes and cars. Families put off their travel plans and vacations. The hapless poor who lost their jobs have resorted to begging, even if they are young and able-bodied. When charities have run out, others have resorted to petty crimes to feed their family and buy medicines for their sick loved ones. When one finds himself in wretched situations, expect him to adopt desperate measures.
The burden of the pandemic has been exacerbated by the series of storms and floods that have greatly devastated many regions of our country. The destructive weather disturbances have severely damaged our agriculture and destroyed our roads, bridges and infrastructures. It will take years and hundreds of billions to rehabilitate them, money that could have been productively spent on other worthy uses. It’s a catastrophe amid a pandemic — a double whammy for a struggling country like ours. It’s a gift that our people’s capacity for pain and suffering seems inexhaustible. But as one critic has bitterly pointed out, “resilience should not be an excuse for ineptitude.”
Our government has adopted programs to address the lethal health emergency confronting us. The Philippines has the longest and strictest lockdown in the world. Only this week, our favorite Chinese restaurant in BGC, which we have patronized for years, has refused to accept us as dinner guests. So we ended up ordering food for take-out. The last time I saw my barber was on March 4 this year. I have been consulting my personal physician online and he charges me the same amount. Our Bayanihan laws are worthy legislation and I credit the administration and Congress for enacting them. They have been passed to extend direct financial assistance to the poor and provide economic stimulus to shore up our declining economy. We are spending billions of taxpayers’ money and borrowed funds to rescue our impoverished people and provide free Covid-19 vaccine to them. Let’s cross our fingers that not a single centavo of the vaccine money, as vowed by President Duterte, will go to corruption. We need a more coherent response to meet the challenge. Our government has created all kinds of task forces to combat the scourge but the pandemic is still very much with us. And our economy continues its decline. It seems that our best efforts have not arrested its downward slope.
Our government is not oblivious of our people’s plight. An economic agenda and a recovery blueprint that focus on the ordinary people who bear the brunt of the current economic dislocation are steps in the right direction. Giving free Covid-19 vaccines to the poor and the vulnerable reflects this policy. The interest of the wealthy and the powerful should not be our priority. Reopening business establishments to provide more job opportunities to the workingmen will bring food on their tables and boost consumer spending. Supporting small and medium enterprises to re-start their operations will enliven our economy. Adopting monetary and fiscal policies that will stimulate business expansion and investments should be continuously pursued. In short, we should bend the projected L-shape trajectory to follow a U-shape recovery.
Christmas is just 10 days away and the kids can now count the remaining days in the fingers of their hands. The kids all over the world are all agog about the gifts that they expect to receive from Santa. I have my own Christmas wish. The vaccine alone, while soon forthcoming, is not sufficient. We need more than that to bring economic recovery fast enough before the situation gets hopeless. I hope that Santa, when he comes to town, will bring us good people with bright and dynamic ideas to win the war for us. We need managers who understand the nuts and bolts of our problems; leaders with strong character not necessarily in the physical sense. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a cripple when he robustly led his country to economic recovery after the Great Depression. Maybe what we need is a New Deal under a decisive leadership to lift our people from misery. We cannot give dole outs till the end of time. Our resources are finite and we cannot borrow forever. 2020 is a year of infamy, which we would all rather forget. While we welcome the New Year, we cannot survive another horrible year.