(Following is the transcript of the segment "Analysis by Winnie Monsod," which aired on News on Q on June 29, 2009. Prof. Winnie Monsod is the resident analyst of News on Q, which airs weeknights at 9:30 p.m. on Q Channel 11.)

Now that the winning bidder in the election automation project has been announced, there is a tendency for the public to sit back, and maybe heave a sigh of relief that the Philippines has entered the modern era as far as elections are concerned.

Come election day, all we have to do is vote, and the dagdag-bawas will be a thing of the past.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of sitting back, the public has to be ever more vigilant, to make sure that we don't find ourselves facing total chaos on election day and - the worst scenario of all - a failure of elections.

What are the reasons for this call for vigilance? Only consider: if you Google the winning bidder, Smartmatic, you will find that whereas it is presented to us as a Netherlands-based company, in other words you get the impression it's doing business in the Netherlands and operates from there, the truth is that it merely was incorporated there, and most of its principals are Venezuelans.



How the company got its start, how it won its first project in Venezuela is very murky, involving shares of stock that were bought by the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez. Suspicions have been voiced that the elections in Venezuela, which were automated by Smartmatic were tainted with fraud.

The point here let's face it is that the company, which was investigated by the U.S. Congress, whose activities in the U.S. have been dogged by protests and investigations, and whose Philippine project is the biggest that it has been undertaken, is not exactly a
company where we can put our complete trust in.

It has to be watched and monitored carefully.

Then there is the question of the Comelec's management capability to implement nationwide in one step a radical change in the way elections are conducted.

None of the Comelec commissioners has any management experience, not one has any expertise in information technology.

Add to this a very tight schedule they imposed on themselves that has to be adhered to for everything is to be in place by election day, and you have a recipe for disaster.

As of mid-June, the Comelec is already one month behind schedule - it should have signed the contract for the project on May 27.

Which means that the delivery of the machines - and we are talking of 82,200 machines here, whose delivery most likely will be delayed - which will mean that their testing and inspection will be delayed, which will mean that their configuration - which involves inputting the names of 340 candidates will be delayed.

And this does not even consider the very tight original schedule, which for example implies that 2,740 machines a day have to be tested and inspected. Does that arouse confidence in your breasts, knowing that under the best of conditions, these machines almost caught fire?

And third, is that it should not be assumed that just because there is automation, there could be no cheating. Given new technologies, it is possible that cheating can occur on an even more massive scale unless steps are taken to prevent that.

Which is why it is imperative that we the public ask the Comelec even now, to prepare a Plan B, a back-up plan which may involve either scaling down or even aborting the program if by a certain date – say November or early December, it has been unable to achieve or revert back to its original time schedule.

And, which is why we - the public - must be doubly vigilant.

The bottom line here is that under no circumstance should a peaceful transfer of power in 2010 be prevented or postponed.

(Following is the transcript of the segment "Analysis by Winnie Monsod"
which aired on News on Q on June 15, 2009. Prof. Winnie Monsod is the resident analyst of News on Q, which airs weeknights at 9:30 p.m. on Q Channel 11.)

Let's break that question down into several sub questions, and let's start with, what exactly do we mean by recession?

A recession is a period of temporary economic decline, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters. In other words, the growth rate is negative during those quarters.

The good news, therefore, is that this has not happened, so far anyway, in the Philippines, unlike in Thailand, for example, or Singapore or Hong Kong, where the growth rates have been negative, 6 per cent for Thailand.

The Philippines has not posted a negative growth rate since 1998. That's good news.

The bad news is that the country's most recent growth rate of 0.4 per cent is four tenths of 1 per cent is actually very close to negative, which is the reason National Statistical Coordination Board Secretary-General Romy Virola said that the economy is "teetering" into recession.

So, the next question is, given that we are "teetering" or at the brink of recession, what is the probability that we will actually fall into recession?

Let us see what the historical data tell us about this.

I looked at the quarterly growth rates from the first quarter of 1982 to the first quarter of 2009 - that's a 27-year period - and found out that in 19 out of those 27 years, or more than 70 per cent of the time, the first quarter growth rates were either lower than the annual growth rates in 15 of the 19 or equal to them, 4 of the 19.

So that is good news - because 70 per cent of the time, the country didn't get worse after the first quarter, it either remained the same, or it got better.

The bad news though, comes out when we zero in on the country's recession years.

Four times in the past 27 years the country experienced recession - in 1984, 1985, 1991, and 1998. And in three out of those four recession years, or 75 per cent of the time, the first quarter growth rates were higher than the growth rates for the year. Meaning to say, things got worse after the first quarter. Ouch.

Let's take this one-step further.

Independent forecasts predict that the country would grow at about 2 per cent this year.

So, why then did we grow much slower than expected in the first three months of the year? Well, let's look at the usual suspects.

International trade figures show a very large contraction but then, exports and imports had been contracting since October of last year, so that was already part of the equation, factored in the forecasts.

So, hindi na 'yan kasali.

Was the culprit the remittances from OFWs? The answer is NO.

The forecasters had factored in that these remittances would be reduced, and slow down the economy as a result, but surprise, surprise remittances from overseas Filipinos increased - by 18.9 per cent in dollar terms, and 38.5 per cent in peso terms, thanks in part to a hefty 44.7 per cent rise in deployment in the first quarter, from 254 000 to 368,000 Filipino workers. Credit for that, by the way, must be given to the Arroyo administration, whose efforts in seeking jobs abroad have been unstinting. Let's face it.

Well then if it’s not trade, if it’s not overseas... sirit na.

One identified culprit is the marked slowdown in personal consumption expenditures - which accounts for roughly 80 per cent of GDP.

These expenditures grew by only 0.8 per cent in the first three months of this year, compared to a 5.1 per cent growth last year, a 5.9 per cent growth two years ago.

In fact, the last time it was anywhere near .8 per cent was in the last quarter of 1991, that was 17, 18 years ago, a recession year, when consumption increased by only 1 per cent.

Another identified culprit is more a crime of omission. The sad fact is that not a single centavo of the government's much touted stimulus package, was spent in the first quarter.

Why? Well, Congress didn't pass the budget until mid-January, and the President didn't sign it until mid-March. Tapos na ang quarter.

So, is there hope of averting the recession? Yes! Please, households, don't try to save more at this stage of the game.

Because when individual households try to save more at this time, you might end up saving less because you might lose your jobs.

And please, government, spend that stimulus package in a manner that will end up in the pockets of the people rather than in the pockets of politicians.

(Following is the transcript of the segment "Analysis by Winnie Monsod" which aired on News on Q on June 1, 2009. Prof. Winnie Monsod is the resident analyst of News on Q, which airs weeknights at 9:30 p.m. on Q Channel 11.)

At least 22 million Filipinos are right now preparing to go back to school or start school for the school year 2009-2010 - which means cash out for tuition and other fees, books and other educational materials, not to mention clothing and transportation expenditures.

And while tuition is free in public elementary and high schools, average expenditures for the rest of the items are in the order of P15,000 - P20,000 per year.

Now, for tertiary education, tuition alone averages P437 per unit for the country as a whole, with tuition in Metro Manila almost double that - P855 per unit, which translates to tuition averaging P16,000 to P30,000 per year, although annual tuition can go as high as P125,000 a year.

Little wonder then that the higher the level of education, the larger the number of dropouts.

According to the latest Philippine Human Development Report, out of 1000 children who enter grade 1, by grade 2 some 140 will have dropped out, and by grade 4 another 100 will have dropped out.

Out of these 760 children who reach grade 4, only 670 will make it to grade 6, and only 650 children will actually complete the full elementary cycle of six years.

But the story does not end there.

Of those 650 who finish elementary school, only 580 will go on to high school. Seventy will dropout of these 580 and only 420-430 will graduate from high school.

Of those high school graduates, only 230 will enroll in college. It used to be 260 when I first started tracking these figures. Out of that 230 who go to college, only 120 of them will actually graduate, or obtain a college degree.

In sum, only 120 out of 1,000 Filipinos who start grade 1 will finish college, the other 880 will have dropped out along the way.

And the worst is yet to come: Of those 120, who finish college only 1 will come from the poorest of the poor - from families at the bottom 10% of the income ladder.

In other words, most of the dropouts are going to be from the lower income groups, whose poverty is perpetuated because they lack the necessary education and skills.

It is a vicious circle, which, as yet, the government has been unable to break.

Another way of illustrating the magnitude and depth of what has been called the crisis in Philippine education is to look at enrollment figures, as shown in the recently launched Philippine Human Development Report of 2008-2009.

The annual average growth rate in public elementary and high school enrollment over the 12-year period 1995-2007 was about 1.78%.

But one sees declining rates over the period, starting with 3.37% growth rate between first and second year of that time period, and ending with less than 1/3 of 1% between the 11th and 12th year.

And not only that: The absolute number of enrollment actually declined in school year 2005-2006 for the first time in recent memory.

At the college level, the same thing happened in school year 2002-2003 (from 2.47 million enrollees to 2.43 million) and in 2004-2005 (from 2.43 million to 2.40 million).

The bottom line so far, with respect to enrollment and dropouts, is that as of 2007, there were 1.84 million out-of-school youth ages 6-11, and 3.94 million ages 12-14; that a total number of out-of-school youth will be 5.8 million young Filipinos who will be eventually entering the labor force with very few skills, and not enough education to allow them to increase those skills and therefore their earning ability.

These almost 6 million unfortunate Filipinos should be the prime targets of the so-called stimulus package of this government.