By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
For years now, I have been hearing disturbing comments that the 4Ps is causing beneficiaries to become lazy. For one, I have heard two friends claiming that one reason for the observed decline in the province’s coffee production in recent years is that the grantees no longer want to hire out their services to maintain the plantations. I have also heard persistent reports that it is one of the reasons for the felt farm labor supply shortage in the Tabuk Valley.
Apart from the effect on the attitude towards labor, I have also heard a lot of information on how grantees misuse the funds by engaging in vices like drinking and gambling, indulging their vanity, purchasing household items totally unrelated to the basic education of their children. The stories about beneficiaries pawning their cash cards and how this malpractice is often exposed at the ATM queue when suspected loan sharks hold up the line with their stack of cash cards was given credence when a friend from Bulanao confessed that he is engaged in lending to 4Ps grantees. He said that he has stopped the practice when some of his clients gave him a dose of his own medicine by securing new cash cards.
What finally prompted me to investigate was when a friend who is not a resident of the province spiritedly defended the program when I posted on Facebook a story on the proposal of Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol for the conversion of the 4Ps to livelihood program because the 4Ps is making people lazy as they only wait for the payout. Among other defences, she cited the findings of the World Bank that the program has reduced poverty and how she had been to places including a town in Ifugao where the grantees are compliant and as a result, have greatly benefitted from the program.
I have observed that one of the favourite arguments employed by pro-4Ps people to defend the program from criticisms is how could the 4Ps be failing when the principals and the midwives sign the compliance certificates? How come have the grantees been able to withdraw their grants if they did not comply? In the case of the DepEd, there is a lot that is not revealed in the compliance form. One is the concern that incidence of students quitting would negatively affect the performance of schools thus the reported bending of the rules so that 4Ps pupils could remain in school. Neither do the forms document the incidence of 4Ps parents being delinquent in the payment of their obligations to the school and also the painful sight of pupils reporting to school without slippers and school supplies. Neither do the forms tell the inconvenience of children who go to school on empty stomachs because their mothers failed to prepare breakfast.
And the program does not have a condition regarding the full usage of the fund intended for a child on the child himself thereby opening the grants to a world of misuse.
The defenders say that the program has been designed to give the parents autonomy on the usage of the fund and thereby learn to be responsible, that to teach them to be so is the function of the monthly family development session (FDS) the attendance to which they earn the P500.00 of the P1,400.00 cash assistance they get a month. Those who conceptualized the program failed to consider the likelihood that the irresponsibility of the parents could be the precise reason for the miserable existence of the family and furthermore, folly when ingrained cannot be remedied by several days of FDS. And if the program banks on the FDS to teach the parents to value the money and thereby use it properly, then at least it should have required the parents to manifest proofs that they have become responsible in the use of the money before the same is entrusted to them. But no, just to prove the confusion of those who conceived the program, it assumes that all the grantees already possess the values the FDS intends to teach them from the very start of their enrolment in the program.
As far as I am concerned, merely on that willingness of the program to give the benefit of the doubt to the poor that they automatically know how to wisely use funds, it can be argued that the concept of the program is crying for an overhaul in order to really benefit its constituents.
I noticed that while people are quick to lambast the program and its grantees, most of my sources took care to qualify that their unsavoury descriptions of 4Ps beneficiaries was not true to all grantees which makes an investigation or survey to give us a reasonable idea of the percentage of those who fall under the category in order.**
