Translating the Agenda into Reality

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has announced to the nation the agenda that her administration will pursue in the next six years.

For the government officials of this region, the task at hand is how to translate that agenda into reality. Of the fighting targets she has set, what portion will be the targets for Eastern Visayas? Of the ten million new jobs, how many will come from this region? These are among the important questions at this time.

The local development councils and the Regional Development Councils all over the country will now have to determine their contributions to the target the national Chief Executive has set. For example, this region might target 100,000 new jobs per year if the unemployment problem is to be reduced because this is the current number of unemployed persons is 150,000 and the labor force is expanding at around 50,000 per year. In 6 years, that would be 500,000 of the ten million target.

Of this 150,000, half or 75,000 will came must probably from agriculture. Thus a basic challenge is how to expand employment in agriculture when modern practices tend to displace labor in favor of machines in order to boost harvest per hectare. This means off-farm employment possibly in agri-business will have to be pursued with vigor.

It would be fine if the individual targets of each region once aggregated will exceed the targets. Supposing they don’t?

The President will have to set higher targets for these regions and that means revisions and more efforts will have to be made.

However, the targets do not look unreachable, but reaching them will require resources – both human and financial plus appropriate systems and technologies. What could be problematic here is the existence of a large budget deficit and the natural resistance of taxpayers particularly private corporations to pay more taxes.

To ensure that the targets are met on schedule, the President will have to carry-out in the next six years a detailed and micro type of management. She has to emphasize efficiency in the use of manpower and funds. A bloated and inefficient bureaucracy will not produce the kind of results she wants.

Attention to specifics will be a main feature of her style of governance given the kind of target setting she has made. That’s why she even wants to go to the barangay level, which is, in itself, a call to implementors to serve the barangays.

Translating the agenda into reality will require some sacrifices from some sectors on top of a lot of ingenuity in improving productivity.