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Speech of Secretary Florencio B. Abad – OGP Public Forum on the Independent Reporting Mechanism (OGP-IRM) Report

Florencio “Butch” Abad|

5 February 2016, Novotel Hotel, Cubao, Quezon City

First of all, thank you for inviting me to speak to you today. There’s a lot of ground for us to cover in this forum, given the nature of the IRM’s Progress Report for the Philippines. The report is quite an extensive document, one that merits a close and careful reading. I’m certain that it will be a useful resource for the Philippine government, the OGP, and all the stakeholders that are collaborating with us, especially as we struggle for greater transparency and openness in the Philippine bureaucracy.

I think that if we take a clear-eyed look at what’s happening to the country, we can agree that the Philippines has progressed immensely over the last five-and-a-half years. Now that the conclusion of the Aquino administration is just months away, we can begin to take stock of all that we’ve accomplished, where we have fallen shy of expectations.

Let’s start with an achievement most relevant for our purposes. When the Philippine government joined the OGP as one of its founding members in 2011, we effectively assumed a pioneering role in the movement for greater openness. Along with other founding states or countries, we pledged to introduce more transparency to our public institutions, as well as engage ordinary citizens in decision-making processes that were previously exclusive to government. What we wanted was to establish lasting governance reform, with the end goal of bringing swift and sustainable development to our respective states.

The fact that the Philippines joined the OGP—and, at the same time, served as a member of its steering committee—was not just an achievement. It also represented a formidable challenge for every nation that pledged its commitment to the partnership. In our case, graft, corruption, and patronage were well-entrenched and continued to be entrenched in the Philippine government. We knew that any political gesture towards openness would require enormous, collaborative effort, much of which would be exercised for the first time in our country.

Joining the OGP as one of its founding members was thus, in my view, a monumental responsibility. It signified long-overdue action by the Philippine government to change the way the bureaucracy works, and to change it so that we could make a positive impact on the lives of Filipinos.

But here’s something we ought to recognize. Our keen participation in the OGP—and our resulting commitment to its standards of transparency and openness—was made possible by the Aquino administration’s reform narrative. As you know, this very narrative was conceived in the run-up to the 2010 Presidential Election, during which President Aquino campaigned on a platform of good governance. This was a direct response to the people’s passionate clamor for transformational leadership.

At the same time, President Aquino’s campaign platform was the face of our political convictions. These were founded on a very simple principle: if we were to strike poverty at its very heart, we needed to correct the failure of our public institutions to protect the people’s welfare. If we wanted to reverse the stubborn trend of poverty in this country, we needed to demand transparency, accountability, and openness in government.

One of the lynchpins of President Aquino’s leadership is his bid for greater openness in the bureaucracy. He believed that a government hidden behind closed doors would leave no room for accountability—and certainly not consistent with the principles of democracy. The solution was not just to rebuild our institutions from the ground up. We also needed to align ourselves with similarly minded peers, to find support in a larger movement that championed our own cause.

This is exactly why our membership in the OGP is invaluable to us. In it, we found—and continue to find—real fellowship among other member states. Like other member countries, we were starting from zero in terms of governance reform. A good number of us who joined the OGP also suffered longstanding legacies of graft and corruption, political unrest, and economic instability. But in spite of the limitations unique to our respective states, each member country pledged to fulfill a wide range of openness commitments in line with the OGP’s vision.

For the Philippine government, the challenge was to overcome our troubled political history. Introducing reform wasn’t just a matter of issuing directives across government. It required unflagging political will, real commitment to the principles of good governance, and a genuine regard for the people’s welfare. Needless to say, establishing true reform is rife with challenges. Many of us are well aware of the long and arduous working hours, the limited availability of crucial information and resources, not to mention resistance to change and bureaucratic inertia.

We could not expect to accomplish much without the engagement of the same citizenry that elected President Aquino into office. Indeed, the people’s support was of great symbolic value to our democracy. It meant that hope remained among our people, who had grown jaded by the country’s political environment. The President’s successful campaign was an extraordinary social movement, propelled by nothing else but public support. He didn’t have to pander to the interests of big businesses and moneyed politicos.

Instead, he forged a contract with the Filipino people, a contract that he had nourished and kept alive since 2010, where every reform gesture, large and small would extend its reach to every part of the country, as well as deepen its impact on the lives of our people. In the process, we made relentless pursuit of corruption cases in government, besides pouring huge investments into our anti-poverty initiatives. This we achieved through better social protection, and social welfare and services programs, such as those for basic education, public health, and livelihood and employment generation. This is exactly what the President meant when he said, “Kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap.” It is a principle that he has always remained faithful to, even from the start of his Presidential campaign.

And so this was an election won by the people and for the people. It makes sense, doesn’t it, that our major initiatives—especially those supported by the OGP—were especially concentrated on public engagement. We’ve already made a fair degree of progress in setting down roots for government transparency and citizen participation, in line with the partnership’s recommendations.
One of the most groundbreaking reforms we advanced was Bottom-Up Budgeting, which we conceived with the late DILG Secretary Jesse Robredo in 2012. This was after he introduced landmark reforms for local governance, specifically the Seal of Good Housekeeping Program and Performance Challenge Grants for excellence in local governments.

We then piloted BUB in 2013, because doing so would finally open up more avenues for citizens to engage in the planning process for local budgets. Before BUB, citizens had little—if any—opportunity to become actively involved in national budget planning. But President Aquino believed that the government does not—and should not—hold a monopoly on governance and fiscal insight. We had to involve the citizens themselves in the decision-making process, so that the resulting National Budget would reflect more and more our people’s needs and aspirations. At the same time, we were able to tap our partners in civil society, who aided communities in thinking through their proposed budgets, and who likewise guided them in participating meaningfully in the program.

The BUB program has since gained significant traction in the public expenditure process. We began 2013 with just P8 billion for the program, covering a total of 595 cities and municipalities. This year, however, BUB now covers all cities and municipalities across the country, and it is amply supported by a budget close to P25 billion.

Implementing this program was rewarding in itself, but we were happy to see BUB gain much recognition from the international community. In 2014, the program bagged a Gold Award in the inaugural OGP Awards in New York City. There, the Philippine government was lauded for a program that made a tremendous impact on our communities. For the first time, we gave Filipinos the opportunity to contribute to the design of their local governments’ respective budgets. We saw communities work hand-in-hand not just with civil society, but also with their local officials, so that poverty at the local level could be better-addressed.

This year, we are widening the BUB coverage to include provincial governments through a program called KALSADA. We hope that by the end of this year we would have paved and rehabilitated all national roads and bridges so that now we are allowed fiscal space to focus on local infrastructure, particularly on provincial roads and arterial farm-to-market roads, thus this program called KALSADA was born. Under this initiative, provincial governments will take a leading role in provincial road management and, along the way, advance good governance practices that will improve the delivery of basic services among local governments.

We are also breaking ground this year by orienting and preparing our almost 42,000 barangay governments for participation in the BUB. The pilot phase of the program is scheduled for 2017, during which we’ll take the first steps in empowering our barangay officials and their communities, especially with respect to the budget process.

But BUB isn’t our only achievement in our drive for open and participative governance. In 2013, for example, the government’s Citizen Participatory Audit—or CPA—bested entries by six other countries in the Bright Spots competition, which was held in the OGP Summit in London that same year.

These are two of our most celebrated examples. But to be honest, many of our openness reforms work without fanfare, and they proceed anyway with quiet success. This is due largely to the dedication of our partners in civil society, local governments, the bureaucracy, our multilateral partners, and the larger public. For example, we owe to them our achievements in Open Data, an online portal that gives the public access to key government information. It’s a first for the Philippine government and a triumph for openness and citizen empowerment.

Meanwhile, we’re doing steady progress in improving the country’s business environment. Last year, we blazed through the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Rankings to a record 49-point jump. While this year saw us backpedal a little, I refer to 2015, we take that not as a discouraging sign, but as a call to surpass ourselves anew.

One of the OGP-inspired initiatives that we’ve completed—and which has also created a wide-ranging impact—is our Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Through EITI, the Aquino administration was able to consolidate transparency efforts among the public and private sectors, as well as civil society and media. To date, we have already published our second report on the revenues of extractive industries in the country. In this respect, we were able to outpace Indonesia, which began working on their report a year ahead of us. They have yet to finish their own report.
But our bid for openness isn’t removed from the reality that Filipinos must confront daily. As a matter of fact, transforming government has created a real and positive impact on the lives of our people. Seeing reform in action has renewed investor and commercial interest in the country, in part because we’ve made landmark gains in various governance and economic benchmarks.

Under President Aquino’s leadership, we finally secured investment-grade rankings from credit rating organizations, which specifically attributed their positive rating action to the Administration’s governance reform initiatives. Most recently, for instance, South Korea’s National Investment and Credit Evaluation, Inc. pushed the Philippines’ profile to investment grade, saying—and I quote—that the upgrade was, among others, due to improved government transparency, which in turn gave way to unprecedented improvements in our country’s risk profile. It’s no surprise, then, that foreign investors and corporations became more confident about foraying into the Philippine market. And what exactly does this mean for the ordinary Filipino? It means more jobs for our growing workforce and more opportunities for creating wealth. It means creating opportunities for further empowerment among many of our citizens.

Just as notable is the huge influx of Foreign Direct Investments towards the country. When we started out in 2010, FDIs amounted to just a little over 1 billion US dollars. But by the end of 2014, FDIs shot up by an impressive 66 percent to P6.2 billion US dollars. Because of this, FDIs under the Aquino administration were hailed as the fastest-growing in the region and the fourth-fastest in the world. Of course, much needs to be done, considering that we must keep pace with FDI levels in other neighboring countries. It’s true that we have a long way to go, but our performance so far proves that we can make our FDI numbers grow by leaps and bounds—but only if we sustain our drive for government transparency and openness.

At the same time, the expansion of the Philippine economy has steadily exceeded global expectations, surprising analysts who had come to expect little of our country.
Between 2012 and 2014, for example, our GDP growth hit a robust 6.2-percent growth average, outpacing our average growth in the preceding 25 years. In 2014, we were the fastest growing economy in Southeast Asia and the second-fastest growing economy in the world, next only to China. And while average full-year growth in 2015 clocked in at 5.8 percent, that hasn’t stopped us from being one of the fastest-growing economies in Southeast Asia.

Meanwhile, Public-Private Partnerships have likewise burgeoned under President Aquino’s leadership. To date, the government already has begun implementing a total of 11 PPP projects, more than the total number of PPP initiatives under the three previous administrations combined. To date, our PPP initiatives have been hailed as some of the best-performing in the region, with Partnerships UK praising the Administration’s PPP Center as the Best Central/Regional Government PPP Promoter during the 2014 Partnerships Awards.

Meanwhile, dropping poverty numbers substantiate the Administration’s good governance agenda, proving that transparent, accountable, and open leadership is the key to long-term and inclusive development. From a first-semester poverty incidence of 28.4 percent in 2009, we managed to bring poverty figures down to 25.8 percent in 2014, despite continuing challenges in addressing food prices, for example. All this seems to be affirmed by a report by the Social Weather Stations, which announced that self-rated poverty declined among Filipinos, which means that fewer and fewer of our countrymen consider themselves poor. Even unemployment numbers have dipped to their lowest in 10 whole years.

Let us not be blind to the fact that so much of this progress is born of good, honest, and increasingly efficient public services. And as I mentioned earlier, our transparency and citizen participation initiatives are one of the keystones in our reform agenda, the very same that’s allowed the Philippines to become a changed country. We are Asia’s Sick Man no more, indeed as Bloomberg has announced last year. Instead, we have become the Strong Man of Southeast Asia.

In view of all this, we must not consider our OGP initiatives as though they were separate from each other. After all, the issue of government opacity cuts across so many institutional identities and behaviors. And opacity, as you well know, is an old and terrible habit of the Philippine bureaucracy. There is only so much that you can achieve by way of governance reform. Our most serious hindrances, such as poverty, political patronage, and social conflicts, are rooted in age-old structural deficiencies and institutional weaknesses.

Only a comprehensive approach to reform will make a difference in the way that the government and the public work together. We must therefore persist in finding focused and holistic solutions in favor of transparency and citizen engagement. This is why the Philippines Progress Report is indispensable to our goal and vision of governance reform. And while the Aquino administration has made significant strides in broadening transparency and accountability in government, the report makes it clear that we have more work ahead of us. It would be disingenuous to say that all’s been well, that the road to reform has been a cakewalk. Not at all. This is something that we in the Administration have understood from the start: the work of reform will be backbreaking, difficult, and frequently thankless.

Speaking of reform, we will be faced once more with a most deciding task in a matter of months. In May this year, we will find ourselves casting our votes in favor of whom we think is deserving of the Presidency. Already, discussions on the coming Presidential Election are fraught with emotion. Debates are getting more and more heated, and brickbats are hurled whenever the chance arises.
I think we need to calm down. Relax muna. Or as the young ones say these days: chill. If we are going to make smart decisions like in the US, it is imperative that we appreciate May 2016 from a sober and objective point of view. We must regard the elections from a perspective that accounts not only for this Administration’s successes, but also for the difficult work of reform that must and should be continued.

President Aquino has already laid so much of the reform groundwork, and we’ve seen so many good things come of transparent, accountable, and participative governance. But as the OGP IRM report notes, much remains to be done. The FOI bill has stalled in Congress, even though the President has forwarded a viable version for the bill, one that considers the difficult political realities that our advocates must navigate. And we need to give citizens the right incentives to alert authorities to government irregularities, and to be fearless in requiring integrity of their leaders. We can only succeed in doing this if our people know that they have the government’s full support and protection.

Ultimately, the question we must answer in the coming elections is one of meaningful citizen empowerment. The Aquino administration made it a point to restore power to a citizenry that has learned to feel helpless in the face of corruption and political patronage. We’re talking about Filipinos whose lives were long held hostage to the motives of self-interested politicians, to corporate juggernauts that engage in maneuvering to secure their monopolies or increase their market share.

But look at where we started in 2010, how conditions in our country were far from ideal. And look at how much we’ve achieved in just five-and-a-half years, despite a host of unremitting challenges. Remarkable, isn’t it? This much is clear: the stakes for this country are much higher now. Our people are learning what it’s like to be valued as partners in governance reform, and they have finally seen what was unimaginable: a government that opens its doors wide to them, a government that engages them. We mustn’t stop, not now.

The Filipino people are only getting to their feet, and we must do their future justice. Thank you very much, and I wish you all a pleasant day.

Filed Under: Anti Corruption and Integrity Anti-Corruption Institutions Fiscal Openness Impact Open Data Private Sector Publication of Budget/Fiscal Information
Open Government Partnership