Tejada: Wages of privatization

DIE HARD III

Herman Tiu Laurel

3/20/2013

Daily Tribune

In the Philippines, public education funds are channeled to support the finances of private — often religious — schools through the voucher system. That is, students enrolled in public schools, where there are shortages of facilities, are given vouchers to study in the nearest private school instead. How much these vouchers cost has never been explained in detail to the public, even as private schools are clearly making good money from them. Thus, instead of public funds being managed properly to ensure that growing public school needs are met each year, the privatization-oriented government churns out these harebrained ideas fed by the neoliberal "educators" who now control the Department of Education (DepEd).

DLSU Bro. Armin Luistro and Commission on Higher Education boss Patricia Licuanan (sister of a top Ayala executive and ardent Edsa Uno Yellow fanatic, who stonewalled open discussions on Edsa I and II as president of Miriam College) continue to peddle the privatization and corporatist model to the detriment of public education, just as the BS Aquino III government continues the post-Edsa Uno regime of long-term deconstruction of the state-led educational system toward a market-oriented one, in keeping with its reorganization of the nation into a private-corporatist society.

A prime example of this is the schoolhouse building scheme under PeNoy's public-private partnership (PPP) program that will cost P1.2 million (PPP figures) while government construction of the same will cost only P700,000. The Filipino-Chinese business community donates similar schoolhouses and its chamber even reports these as costing only P300,000 per unit (with the same set of specifications).

We can therefore see that with the PPP being privatization in action, costs are raised even higher than in any corrupt-ridden government schoolhouse construction program. And that's not even including what we have yet to calculate as the "change order" to be additionally imposed by the private contractors who will maintain these structures for years.

What a government that is genuinely for the people's welfare will do is either clean up the DPWH (Department of Public Works and Highways) as contractor, instead of under the present system where school authorities have the power to contract these to private builders, or, what I would prefer, engage the Philippine Army Engineering Corps in an emergency campaign (as Roosevelt did in the New Deal) to build schoolhouses and bring costs down massively.
The suicide of the bemedaled 16-year-old UP Manila Behavioral Science scholar Kristel Tejada for failing to cover even the discounted "socialized" UP tuition must be put in the context of the overall neoliberal economic, social and ideological regime. The schoolhouse building crisis is but an illustration of commercialization and privatization raising costs.

Unfortunately, some shoot-from-the-hip quarters are personalizing the Tejada issue against the UP chancellor Manuel Agulto and vice-chancellor Josephine de Luna. It distracts from the main problem and is unjust. Agulto didn't seek the chancellorship but was selected by acclamation.
NUSP, the student group, errs in personalizing the issue but is correct in critiquing the State Universities and Colleges' "socialized tuition" policy as a mask for commercial tuition impositions where it should be free and subsidized.

The seemingly irresolvable dilemma Tejeda faced that led to her sense of hopelessness is a crisis being faced by the countless poor, working, or unemployed class of Filipinos: How to afford the basics of living in a "dog-eat-dog" society of free market economics, where all citizens' former social entitlements are commercialized, monetized and privatized, under a system that has made the poor poorer and the rich richer and fewer where no one seems to care anymore.
Kristel's death seems more senseless than many reported suicides of the poor as Filipino society still has a special place in its heart for young "scholars." Others not so regarded, like ordinary laborers who jump from pedestrian overpasses or kill themselves after losing their jobs and then kill every member of their kin, merit only momentary tabloid attention to draw the curious among readers.

Kristel's father, Christopher, is reportedly a part-time taxi driver who lost his regular job as a warehouse coordinator when his company shut down. We can imagine the real-life narrative of Kristel's parents struggling daily to make ends meet on the irregular income of a part-time taxi driver for the food, water and electricity (that costs the highest in Asia); of filling the taxi with enough highly VAT-laden fuel to keep running the 24-hour shift on alternate days; of buying the cough medicine needed for the asthma from the polluted city air; and of paying rent for the hovel the family calls "home."

Kristel's suicide may not be as senseless as it is today if tomorrow more Filipinos were to join the chorus for change and call for the return of a rebalanced society, where the lower instincts of corporate greed and opportunism are subsumed to the greater good in a social-market economy.

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