Pia: "GMA not a good mother to our nation"

"President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has not been a good 'mother' to a people badly in need of a credible and inspiring leader."

This sums up the performance of Mrs. Arroyo in the last eight years as Chief Executive of the country, according to Senator Pia S. Cayetano, Chairperson of the Senate Committee on Social Justice at the opening of the third regular session of the 14th Congress today.

"The mother is supposed to be 'ilaw ng tahanan' (light of the household) that people will look up to for inspiration. But her leadership can be likened to a flickering, busted light bulb that has elicited distrust and has kept most Filipinos in the dark," she stressed.

"A good mother should set the right priorities, inspire moral direction and initiative, and instill discipline at home, or in this case, the entire nation. She should allow acts of wrongdoing to go unpunished. But Mrs. Arroyo's skewed system of reward and punishment over the years has allowed plunderers involved in various scandals to go scot-free, while government personnel who blow the whistle on these scandals are either jailed or persecuted."

Cayetano said the Philippine government's eight commitments under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and not Mrs. Arroyo's self-imposed and self-serving SONA targets, should be a more reliable gauge of her administration's performance since 2001.

The MDGs include eight time-bound, concrete and specific targets aimed at significantly reducing poverty by the year 2015. These targets were set in September 2000 by 189 UN member-countries, including the Philippines, and adopted as the UN Millennium Declaration.

She said the Philippines is likely to fail in meeting three crucial targets, including the reduction of the maternal mortality ratio (MDG 5), reduction of child mortality (MDG 4) and achieving universal primary education (MDG 2).

Progress has been slow in both these targets, she noted. MDG 4 aims to reduce by two-thirds the infant mortality rate (IMR) or the death rate among children below five years old, while MDG 5 intends to cut by three quarters the maternal mortality rate (MMR) or death rate among mothers.

Official records show that in 2003, the IMR was 40 per 1,000 live births and it went down to 32 per 1,000 in 2006. The government targets an IMR of 24 per 1,000 by 2015.

The maternal mortality ratio (MMR) refers to the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. MMR in 2006 was 162, representing only a six percent improvement from an MMR of 172 in 1998. This is still far off the country's target of an MMR of 52 by 2015.

With regard to MDG No.2 or achieving universal education (or 100 percent enrolment) by 2015, she noted that elementary school participation rate dropped from 96.8% in school year 2000-01 to 85.1% in 2008-08; the high school participation rate dropped from 66.1% to 60.7% over the same period.

"Instead of advancing, we seemed to have retrogressed in keeping track of these goals. Mrs. Arroyo could have made a difference as President for an equivalent of 1-1/2 terms. But she bungled the opportunity."