ISN’T it revolting to learn that while President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo promised her people of progress and prosperity in the next few years by regaling us with multi-million mega projects in this and that region in the next few years, here’s the bad news that the population census for this year has been cancelled due to non-availability of funds?.

        The latest census that the country has is over ten years old now, which makes us wild guessing on figures that to our disgust has been played to the advantage of pro-administration technocrats, including the president, to repeatedly lie about, if not exaggerate, the true state of the nation. That is why, without batting an eyelash, the president can look straight into dumb cameras that employment has improved and that lesser Filipinos are hungry now.

        The National Statistics Office (NSO) is mandated to conduct the census of population and other pertinent data such as housing every ten years. And the next decennial census is scheduled in 2010 after the last census should have been conducted in 2000 which we did not. The NSO blames the failure of Congress to pass the 2006 national budget for its inability to conduct a population census this year. Last year’s attempt to conduct the same was scrapped, too, due to, what else, lack of funds. The NSO said that even if the budget is released next month (assuming that the budget has been passed in speedy fashion), lack of time to prepare for such gargantuan task remains a problem.

        This week, the Business Mirror reported that population management advocates earlier criticized the government for announcing that the country’s growth rate has now declined to 1.9%. They argue that this was just another “pie in the sky” where there is no intelligent basis because census has still to be conducted.

        We have an economist in Malacañang and yet she appears unperturbed by the country’s not having these hard facts, which could only be justified by a national census where enumerators and field supervisors would have to conduct in every home of every barangay of every town and city of every province in the country’s 17 regions, and feed the results in processors that should give our economic advisers and decision-makers the nation’s true picture before anybody can set directions. The least that we need at this time is a census about corrupt inefficient leaders outnumbering the good ones because we already know that one. And their tribe is increasing beyond anyone’s projection which requires us to cut them at every chance.

        Meanwhile, the country sinks deeper into an abyss of distrust despite government’s repeated claims to the contrary. Prices of commodities are rising twice as fast as they did in 2002 because inflation rate irreversibly shoots up from 3.1% in 2002 to 7.2% today.

        While it is true that global oil prices have had much to do with it, the inflation rates of our neighbors who have not been spared by the same oil price increases did not move as fast as ours.

        Well, things like these no longer disturb our national government leaders because they feel comfortable relying on tales they have woven rather than facts. We pray that their ilk would not be banished from the census when we shall already have an updated one.