A people’s platform

NO HOLDS BARRED
Ike Señeres

MANILA -- The initiative to hold people’s primaries is a good idea, but what is yet another good idea is to complement it with a people’s platform that will be the basis for choosing candidates that the people could support. The good news is, we do not have to crack our brains for new ideas because the ideal people’s platform already exists, and it is already contained in Agenda 21, the national agenda for sustainable development for the 21st century.

First things first- Agenda 21 might have been a product of government processes, but it is an agenda that now belongs to the people, because it has already been affirmed by the Congress that represents the will of the people. Having clarified that, it is no longer a question of whether the people should support it or not, because that is no longer debatable. The issue now is whether we are going to implement it or not, whether we are going to just let it rot as a paper document or not.

Agenda 21 is a well written and is a well thought of document. In a manner of speaking, it is a good showcase of how good we are in expressing ourselves in written English. The only remaining question now is whether or not we will also become good in making it happen, because talk is one thing because talk is cheap. Talk is easy, but what is hard is to stop talking and to start acting.

Looking back at the background of Agenda 21, it is the local manifestation of international agreements reached in Rio de Janeiro, meaning that it is not just our own national will that is at stake here, it is also our place in the community of nations that is at stake. We said yes to the rest of the world, so there is no more excuse for us to get out of our global commitments no matter what local difficulties we are going to have.

Talking about international commitments, it seems that we as a nation is not doing too well in our commitments to the United Nations, in terms of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Human Development Index (HDI). This could actually be a source of collective national shame, if only we could realize the gravity of our collective national failure.

I am willing to risk my reputation as a writer to say outright that our present national system of reporting our MDG compliance to the United Nations is not honest and neither is it transparent. As far as I know, all member countries of the United Nations are supposed to report actual empirical data that are collected from below, from the local city and municipal data sets, and we do not seem to be doing that.

Granting for the sake of argument that Agenda 21 is too broad of a document to be used as a people’s platform, we could nonetheless argue that those who are seeking the vote of the people for local and national positions should base their campaign promises on the delivery of MDGs, which are really nothing more that the internationally accepted means of measuring the delivery of basic services at the local and the national levels.

In the absence of any other empirical means of measuring the success or failure of local and national governance, we should just turn to the global measures set by the HDI method, namely the measurement of the per capita income, the literacy rate and the mortality rate. Simply put, the per capita income is a good means of measuring the poverty rate, the literacy rate is a good means of measuring the delivery of education services, and the mortality rate is a good means of measuring the delivery of health services.

For the record, not all of the Regional Development Councils (RDCs) are meeting regularly and religiously as mandated by the law. This gives us the clue that the MDG compliance reports of the national government are probably just fabricated figures, because the data from below should have been validated by the RDCs, if only they are really meeting as they are supposed to be.

As we start to choose the candidates that we will vote for, we should start asking them how they are going to implement Agenda 21 if they are elected, and how they are going to comply with our local and national MDG commitments, as well as how they are going to increase or lower the local and national HDI measures as the case may be. Truth to tell, promises of delivering livelihood would only address a means to an end, because in the final reckoning, it is the increase in the per capita income that matters most.

Watch my TV show “Bears & Bulls”, a daily coverage of the Philippine Stock Exchange. 9:00 am to 1:00 pm in Global News Network. Email iseneres@yahoo.com or text +639293605140 for local cable listings.