While unlikely, if anyone from this
Government or the next one or ever, asked me for a piece of advise, I would tell
them to either hire Luis Pedro España, or give him grants to advise the
Government on how to attack poverty and evaluate programs aimed at helping the
poor. Nobody like España from Universidad Catolica has devoted more time to
understand the problems, possible solutions and the impact of programs that
have been implemented. Below another great article by him, which appeared on
Saturday’s El Nacional:
When
will we have Mision Niño? by Luis Pedro España
Defenders and detractors of the social programs of this Government
(The “Misiones”) would coincide in the political origin of these public policies.
Even though democracies and its Governments live off the support that its own
good execution and policies may give them, and that is why it is legitimate to pretend
to exchange votes for good policies, the clear electoral orientation of these “misiones”is
almost embarrassing. Could it be that because little kids don’t vote, it is
that we don’t have a Mision Niño?
I think that since social programs appeared in Venezuela sometime
during the second Government of Perez, we refer to programs which were born
with the adjective of being compensatory and focused, we have always evaluated
with suspicion the attempts by the Government to “collect politically” what we
(naively) have always considered to be the duty of the state towards the weaker
ones. With those convictions, many years ago, we almost convinced a Minister
that social policy should be a field free of cheap politics, that one should
not play with the dignity of the poor and least of all manipulate it, that
social policy is not only providing social services, but also how you hand them
over, that pork barrel and dependencies are chains that are too heavy for the
poor to carry, like shackles given out by a dictatorship, etc, etc, etc…
Recently, Prof. Luis Luengo reminded us how in one of our research
projects about social programs, the beneficiaries had no idea of who was responsible
for these benefits reaching their hands and their families. Our colleague remembered
that in San Carlos,
Cojedes state, a name appeared in our polls as responsible of the multihome
program who was not a Governor, nor a Mayor, nor a representative from any NGO.
Our intrigue was resolved when we were told that the man to whom the
beneficiaries of that program of child care thanked for its operation was simple
a radio announcer, that talked a lot and very well about the most important
social program Venezuela
had had in the last fifteen years.
When
this administration assumed the Government, the first thing it
did was to send to hell the social programs it had inherited. First
they
eliminated the food scholarship (almost 1% of GDP in direct transfers
to the poorest
homes) so that later, very slowly and making use of prolonged and
accumulated inefficiencies,
they got rid of the then surviving programs for the population with the
least resources.They got rid of whatever little there was, without
there being any evaluation,
or what is even more important, having anything to replace them with.
Thus went by the first three years of Government and a macroeconomic
adjustment
(February 2002) before the arrival of the management from the sister
Socialist Republic
of Cuba, to reestablish some social policy for the poor.Because we knew
about them, we evaluated them, we helped them grow and we are convinced
that the institutional history of the country will ask them to pay back
for the
destruction that they made of the Multihome and Daily Care Homes, is
that we complain
that this Government, as in many other things, lacks a policy towards
infancy.
There is no “Mision Niño” as we suppose they Woould call the circus they would set
up if they were concerned with the children of Venezuela. Kids don’t vote and
their parents appreciate other goods and services that end up being more direct
and difficult of resolving, like the problem of youth. There is no substitute
to the home and multihomes programas, except for the tenacity with which some
Governors maintain the program, despite the erratic FUS (Social Fund) and the
institutions that depend from it. Separately, Senifa, the organization of the
central Government that should be in charge of these topics, continues to
tumble around between trying to stop being what it was and without knowing what
it wants to be.
On the side of the Lopna (Law for the Protection of kids and adolescents)
it isn’t much that we can hope for.
The Lopna is a mess, made (according to what they claim) for a country
with a level of institutional strength that we lack. Anyone that believes that
the Law for the protection of kids and adolescents has implicit a policy for the
kids and youth of the country, must be one of those that believes that you
decree reality, or better yet, you legislate it.
Because it lacks a policy towards infancy is that infant mortality remains
stuck, that the deficit in pre-school care or initial care remains the same,
that our mothers in the popular sectors can not go to work because they don’t have
anyone to leave their little kids with, that the trend towards the increase of
juggling or begging kids increases is a reality and that, finally, the lack of
attention towards the weakest ones of the chain of social penuries, continues
without any attention.
The Mision Niño does
not exist and may never exist, unless our infants can pay with political acts,
songs and hysterical slogans in favor of the President, the oil crumbs that may
come out of his kind and interested hands
The Devil's Excrement 
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