Manila and the elderly me

I went to the barangay hall (a residential unit that serves as an office) last December to claim cash subsidy for senior citizens. I've been one of Manila's senior citizens since January 2023.

The mood was light and enticing, as can be expected in such an occasion where oldies become kids again, showing more animation as the time to open their Christmas presents approaches. I got old dismissing myself as a social animal, but I was there: trying to exchange feel-good banter among fellow elderlies. I could also sense the good-mannered mien of barangay officials and staff members. While waiting for my turn, one of them offered to print three photocopies of my senior citizen ID.

And then my name was called. My anticipation grew to excitement as I took a seat in front of the barangay chairwoman. Shortly after she gave me two glossy one-thousand-peso bills, she asked me to raise them, along with a print copy of my ID, to level with my wrinkled face. She herself was taking my photo like she did with all beneficiaries before me.

I joked about the elaborate rituals. I also thought about the environment owing to what seemed to me as inordinate use of paper for the documentation, but I kept this thought to myself.

"For audit purposes," she explained.

There was more. The chairwoman also gave away boxes with a Manila City Hall label and branding. She also took photos of these gifts with the happy recipients. I would later learn that this box contained a coffee mug.

After the profuse thank-you repartees, it was time for me to sign the acknowledgement sheet. Another staffer scanned the roster for me. After going over all the lists, she announced to my horror that I was not in any of them. She however clarified that I was in the "not qualified" list.

I heard staccato of words coming from the barangay chairwoman, her staff, and fellow elderlies. They probably meant to console me, but I could not exactly remember what they said. All I remembered was Manny Pacquiao landing a sneaky punch on my flat nose. For a few seconds I tried to recover from a knockout blow. In my embarrassment and with reluctance, I returned the money and the box to the barangay chairwoman.

The barangay staffer who earlier produced photocopies of my ID offered to message somebody—assumably one who had authority—for clarification. I waited for her word, who later advised me to proceed to the Manila Office for Senior Citizens Affairs at San Andres in Malate. And so to the OSCA in Malate I went the next day.

I have been to this place when I applied for my ID a year ago and had to remind myself that three copies of each document that need to be processed would be required. So I decided to have three copies of my ID photocopied prior to proceeding to the OSCA. Unlike the people at the barangay hall, the people at OSCA did not appear pleased to see me, correctly judging that I was worth nothing more than rubbish and probably dump-bound.

Feeling prepared and accomplished, I showed an OSCA staffer the three copies of my ID while explaining to him that the barangay had sent me to them. I decided against pounding on the tale of my aborted cash gifts after noting no one among my fellow OSCA callers was there to claim anything. The staffer was about to launch a homily on how people like me are better off by following instructions when another staffer, a lady, intervened to say I was probably in the dump list. The guy attending to me must have felt relief to find a way by which to get rid of me. "Go to City Hall," he said.

At the OSCA in City Hall, crews of mostly young female staffers made sure their visitors felt attended to. I wondered if it was policy to hire more women when old men were always outnumbered by old women anywhere. The thought was out of order, of course, and I had to settle with the observation that OSCA staffers were trained to keep old men charmed; and also maybe to keep them from feeling grumpy? It definitely did not take long for me to feel grumpy.

One of the staffers offered me a chair as soon as she saw me trying to make my way to the entrance door, assuring me of her support as if I was inside the office myself. I liked this set up. It meant I did not need to argue my case with anyone. But it also prompted me to think that the office did not have enough space for its visitors. Like many of its neighboring cities, Manila just doesn't have enough space for its constituents: the homeless on the streets and those who call the sidewalks their workplaces—vendors (both mobile and extensions of existing structures) and yes, even barangay fixtures, facilities, and police precincts.

But space limitations don't prevent OSCA in Manila City Hall from getting its job done. As I waited for feedback from the staffer to whom I gave photocopies of my ID after telling her the purpose of my visit, I could see fellow senior citizens leaving the place with the look of satisfied customers.

After about fifteen minutes, the staffer came back to me with a heartbreaking news. She said I was in the inactive list because I supposedly failed to claim the cash subsidy in two previous occasions that this dole out was given by the city government. I tried to explain that the first time I went to the barangay in April 2023, the barangay officials did not found my name in the list, assuring me instead that I should be included in the next payout; the second time in August 2023, the same barangay officials told me there was nothing left for me because I was late, again assuring me that I should be included in the next payout.

I raised my voice in protest, arguing with the polite and calm lady staffer to whom I should have apologized later, that I did try to claim my cash subsidy on every occasion that I got wind of it, except that each time I did so I left the barangay empty handed. My agitated pleading changed nothing. She advised me to get a certificate of re-activation from my barangay.

On reflection, I can understand why OSCA unqualifies those who are unable to claim their goodies for the two previous payout dates. But I think the basis of such a policy is a false, cold-blooded assumption: that either the beneficiary has died or has transferred to another local government unit (LGU), so there is no point in appropriating funds for something that is not there.

Despite the paper-and-ink-heavy documentation that both OSCA and the barangay require for their transactions, they are unable to support their operating protocol with data. Otherwise, they would have known that I have yet to die and have not transferred to another OSCA. LGUs in fact have a strategic resource that they can leverage to access data from Comelec, Philhealth, Department of Social Welfare and Development, Bureau of Internal Revenue, among other agencies of government. Pooling of government data through application programming interface (API) for whole-of-government use can boost LGUs' digital transformation, especially in areas of disaster risk management and property tax management reform. This resource is civil registry data on births and deaths. Use of this data can put an end to fraud that exploits thousands of members Philhealth, Comelec, GSIS, SSS and other pension systems, etc. who appear on their records as alive but are in reality already living in another world.

I can also understand why LGUs would prefer to spend money to hire people than invest in digitalization. People can vote in an election, while machines cannot. While efficient administration and good governance is good politics—in many cities in Japan, South Korea and China, for example, people pay their property taxes online in a process that (i) gets done in less than five minutes, (ii) minimizes cheating and evasion, and (iii) resolves disputes in a highly transparent manner—but it may not necessarily mean the reformers get rewarded at the polls.