Notes on SONA 2020
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Manila, 29 July—Tis the season for State of the Nation Addresses, which are constitutionally mandated presidential speeches traditionally held in July, when the Congress convenes as an entire body to begin its regular session for the year.
This year, with the thread of COVID-19, and dozens of attendees testing positive for the virus so close to the speech, it was uncertain up until 2 p.m. whether the President would indeed go to Batasang Pambansa to make his speech.
In the end, the President eventually made his way to Batasan via chopper and started delivering his speech quite promptly. [Full text here.]
I’d hoped he would talk about our COVID response at length; of course, what wishful thinking. He spent maybe about 10% of his speech on that topic, and much of the hour-long-and-a-half-ish speech meandering and railing against Sen. Frank Drilon, “oligarchs” and “ABS-CBN” and, his new targets, telcos.
Timely, considering perhaps that his next “project” would be to finally pave the way for his crony Dennis Uy’s third telco DITO, which by the way just missed all of its deadlines this month. Another ally, the Villars, also recently launched their internet provider service, Streamtech (formerly Planet Cable).
[READ: Quick point-by-point summary of Duterte’s SONA 2020 via Rappler]
Fun fact: One of the questions raised against Mislatel, which is part of the third telco consortium now named DITO (also composed of Dennis Uy companies Udenna and Chelsea and Chinese state-run China Telecom), is about the validity of its franchise, which was riddled with alleged franchise violations over the years. You know who raised this during the Senate probe? Sen. Drilon.
[READ: Some old notes on the third telco selection from November 2018]
Anyway, this telco conversation is bound to be messy and will likely linger until Christmas (because someone wants to call Bethlehem and talk to Jesus?) so I’m going to leave it for a bit to go back to the SONA.
Seeing barely any discussion of the pandemic and the government’s plans about it, I set off to find transcripts of the Pre-SONA Forums, hoping they would offer better information. There were three pre-SONA Forums this month:
Report by the Economic Development Cluster and Infrastructure Cluster on July 8. [Reports downloadable at the Investor Relations Office website: Dominguez, Villar, Diokno]
Report by the Human Development and Poverty Reduction Cluster and Participatory Governance Cluster on July 15
Report by the Security, Justice and Peace Cluster & Climate Change Adaptation, Mitigation and Disaster Risk Reduction Cluster on July 22
I also came across the President’s Penultimate Report to the People (2016-2020), which I suppose is a SONA Technical Report of sorts. It was difficult getting past the whole first person POV (“I did this, I did that”—ano, ikaw lang? Mag-isa? Even for the most efficient of them, I would have found this arrogant, but REALLY THIS ONE? The gall.)
Anyway, that aside, the report has a handful of interesting infographics—like this one, on the distribution of accredited COVID-19 testing labs across the country and their respective daily maximum testing capacities: Metro Manila has 38 labs, with close to 30k capacity, while Region XIII (Caraga) has ZERO.
[READ: 27 new COVID-19 vases reported in Caraga region via Manila Bulletin]
Sayang, kasi the report has the details we’re looking for sa speech mismo—meron naman palang plano re: PPEs, for example (44% of 6.3 million PPE sets delivered as of July 14, with procurement of 10.36 million PPE sets worth P20.72B — hm each set @ P2k each).
May details din regarding hiring of additional healthcare professionals, contact tracing efforts, local isolation and general treatment areas, solidarity treatment trials. Bakit hindi nasama ang mga ito sa speech, instead of all that drivel and vitriol?
Meron din namang detalye re: transportation assistance for frontline workers (~1.6 million health workers transported nationwide as of July 22)
Naka-cite din dito ang contributions ng big businesses to COVID response—despite being threatened, the Ayala and MVP Groups were actually cited here for their COVID assistance and advance tax payments.
And of course, we have an infographic about the much-touted Malasakit Centers spearheaded by the President’s favorite senator. Ever wondered where these are? Apparently they’re all over. Still not quite sure what they do, though, that are not already being done by existing offices?
There’s a brief mention of the Marawi Rehabilitation, but it’s a single page with four staged photos and three really short captions naming the officials in the said photos. No vital updates about the rehab AT ALL.
Meanwhile, the report also spends three entire pages detailing efforts on “uplifting morale of troops” through various pay hikes and social benefits programs, etc.
The report also refers to the West Philippine Sea as South China Sea and has like 50 words about being “actively involved” as a coordinator of meetings.
Anyway, this report is huge, with some data sets actually having annual data from 2016. Researcher’s delight! LOL. A couple of annexes toward the end even have statuses of ongoing infrastructure projects. Fun.
Unfortunately, the report is 220 pages long, and I can’t highlight everything that is interesting, but it’s still easily downloadable here.
Sorry for going off on you like that; PDFs get me excited, what can I say.
Thank you for making it this far.
Xo,
K