Mendicancy and governance

The COVID-19 pandemic, disasters, and Russian invasion of Ukraine with the limited Philippine government’s responses in the last three years will push the poverty levels of the country above the 20% level. The Conditional Cash Transfer Program/Pantawid sa Pamilya were re-calibrated to remove those who are no longer eligible, they will be replaced by the new poor. This is a tricky move as more and more people are getting poor or poorer. And below those falling into the “safety net” of the Pantawid, are those falling out of the net. These are the mendicants, people who beg in the streets or from house to house to survive, to live.

Mendicants are the faces of poverty and exist all over the world in many countries. Definitely, less in the highly-developed countries with high per-capita income. For countries with poverty levels in the 20% and up, the mendicants could range from 2% to 4% of the population. Rarely would we see a beggar in the northern European Nordic countries and in the Asian countries like Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. It is also diminishing in fast-growing economies like China, Vietnam, and Malaysia but still problematic in varying degrees in the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.

A responsible government’s objective is to remove visible mendicants, which are the beggars in the streets. The long-term target is to reduce poverty incidence, as defined by the minimum living wage to between 5% to 10% of the population, and extreme poverty/mendicants to 1% of the population. In the Philippines with more than 20 million Filipinos in the poverty threshold, there are easily two million to four million falling out of the safety net or mendicants, and not all of them are in the streets.

Many of them are surviving with whatever the government is doling out, but many more are surviving with the help of private households. Growing up over the years and now with my own household, there were always families that my parents subsidized and there are families my family now subsidizes.

Last Friday’s The FREEMAN published an Anti-Mendicancy Ordinance of the Municipality of Balamban, Cebu, which pretty sums up what the government will do about mendicancy. It defines the duties and functions of their Anti-Mendicancy task force, the prohibited acts of begging, giving, and abetting mendicancy, penalties, and the services that will be provided by the local government.

It is a good ordinance and credit should go to Mayor Binghay and the councilors. It puts details and localize P.D. 1563, the Anti-Mendicacy law of the Philippines in 1978. Given the economic conditions during the martial law years, this law was never really enforced but the law is existing. It will still be difficult to implement this law, now that our economy is in slow growth, but it would be good to revisit this law to adapt to the current economic conditions. The Balamban ordinance is in the right direction, as mendicancy is best addressed at the local government level.

Despite the corruption, leakages, and politicization of the Pantawid anti-poverty program, it is a necessary and successful program. Now, that the local governments have more financial resources due to the Supreme Court Mandanas ruling, it is best that the mendicancy problem be given to the local government. In a town of 100,000 population, there are probably less than 4,000 people in extreme poverty or 1,000 families. Prevention and elimination of mendicancy in the town should have programs and the appropriate annual budget. It is surely within the capability and the capacity of the local government to address this problem.

As a little boy in a town of 30,000 population in the late 1950’s, I remember there were only four street beggars in our town and we kids even knew all their names. We also knew all the families that were really hard up and had to be helped. The Philippine economy was barely out of the war and yet people survived with the little help from the local government and kind families.

When I was MCWD chairman, I proposed to the mayor that MCWD will make and implement programs for street dwellers sleeping every night in the wide sidewalk fronting the MCWD office. We had brought back MCWD to profitability at that time and we could allocate annual amounts for social programs. My term ended before we could get the program approved. The point is that extreme poverty/ mendicancy are local governance issues and can be solved by a good local government at an affordable annual budget.