A President for desperate times
January 15th, 2003
Along certain jeepney routes, children as young as four will clamber into a passenger jeepney or bus even before it’s completely stopped to wipe the passengers’ shoes with a rag in exchange for a few centavos. In some cases it’s a team of brothers or brother and sister, with the older helping the younger get into the moving vehicle by almost throwing him/her into it, of course at considerable risk to life and limb to both.
At the hole-in-the-wall tiendas in the alleys and back streets of Manila’s University Belt where students eat, bands of street children wait for whatever the eaters will leave on their plates, staring hungrily at the food in the meantime. Sometimes they can’t even wait, and grab morsels from the tables. The same thing is happening right within a school campus, in the 500-hectare University of the Philippines enclave in Diliman.
Under the capital’s bridges, flyovers and overpasses, in bus and jeepney stops as well as in the doorways of abandoned buildings, entire families have taken up residence, wandering the metropolis during the day to beg or steal whatever they can, and returning at night to beds of cardboard and plastic sheets.
The Philippine population is currently at 78 million. Forty percent, say unreliable government statistics, live below the poverty line, which means the number could be more. In Manila, 60 percent live in substandard housing, which means no taps, no toilets and hardly any protection from the elements.
Many Filipinos go without the benefit of even the most rudimentary medical care and die prematurely from preventable diseases. Millions of schoolchildren drop out of school every year or have never even seen the inside of a classroom. Violence also rules the streets of Philippine cities. But it reigns as well in the countryside, where local tyrants rule under no law except their interests.
The human rights every Philippine Constitution from the Malolos Republic to the present has guaranteed every Filipino are mocked by the absence of that most basic right of all, the right to life, which for nearly half of the population is both short and brutish.
No Filipino needs statistics to know that these are desperate times, and that the country’s going to hell in a hand basket. But the prospects for the future are even worse. Within two decades the country’s population could double to 140 million, with 60 million living in poverty.
No one who has looked at the state of the country, and feared for the future as a result, has ever argued against the need for reform, and even for revolution.
This is true even for the very few whose wealth and power are conditioned on the poverty and impotence of the many. Reform is indeed the stuff of the sermons of the priests and dignitaries of one of the world’s wealthiest Churches, and the word falls as easily from the lips of even those businessmen who habitually cheat their workers.
But the most expert at talking about it while doing nothing are the politicians and the members of the uppermost levels of the bureaucracy, who publicly talk about change and argue the need for it even as they plunder the public treasury and stay up nights concocting the elaborate schemes that can enrich them further.
In declaring on January 9 to an audience of foreign diplomats during the traditional New Year vin d’honneur at Malacaņang that the country must either reform or perish, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo thus said nothing new, or even unique for someone from a member of the political elite.
Not only their subalterns, but every Philippine president within memory him/herself has indeed said the same thing.
Ferdinand Marcos, whom the country identifies least with change and who represented the political elite’s determination to resist change, in fact argued for “revolution” in Today’s Revolution: Democracy, one of the books ghostwritten for him—except that what he launched in 1972 was not a revolution but a counterrevolution.
The Aquino government was a reform government, committed in so many words, and in the 1987 Constitution it crafted, to that necessity. Fidel Ramos’s government vowed to eradicate poverty by achieving economic tigerhood. Joseph Estrada’s government, which was supposedly for the poor, collected, among others, apostates from the Left supposedly to realize that vision—except that the only vision they turned out to have, in imitation of their high-rolling patron, was for palatial homes and money-making foundations.
But before them all was Diosdado Macapagal, who declared in a major speech in the 1960s the need to complete “the unfinished revolution”—meaning the 1898 one launched to achieve independence as well as social change, but which, like all other revolutions in this country, failed to realize its aims.
No one can look at Philippine society, whether then or now, and oppose change. It is so obviously flawed, so obviously poor and so obviously on the brink of a total breakdown that it cannot remain as it is. That is why even those who benefit from it and who wield the economic and political power reserved for the few in this country say—when pressed, and between dancing and singing for votes—that they’re for change, though they’re really for the opposite.
The reason for this subterfuge is simple enough: they need the support, even if it be passive at best, of this country’s citizens, theoretically the real power wielders in this country.
One of the tragedies of Philippine “democracy” is that the elections that are its most obvious—and sometimes its only—expression has become a front with which to conceal the political elite’s basic commitment to the status quo. It has also become the fig leaf to hide the most fundamental reason for this country’s current state, and that is, the Philippine state’s captivity to a corrupt, unimaginative and outrightly stupid elite interested only in keeping and expanding its economic privilege and power. It is this captivity which has weakened the Philippine state, compromising its capacity to address with any will or competence—and which has in fact compounded—the problems that have hounded this country for decades.
In previous speeches—for example in her “strong republic” State of the Nation Address in July 2002, and her December 30, 2002, announcement that she will no longer run in 2004—Mrs. Arroyo has indicated an awareness of that captivity.
The fundamental question now, having echoed the need for reform, and having used the word revolution to describe Philippine society’s only alternative to its own destruction, is whether Mrs. Arroyo, assuming her goodwill and sincerity, has the imagination and the will to take the steps necessary to strengthen the State.
That will not require “empowering the bureaucracy” and arming a virtually unchecked police and the military with extraordinary powers. Initially at least, it will mean using the powers of the presidency without the interests of the political elite and the dominant classes to hamper their exercise.
But it will require more. It will need a vision of the future that can guide the making of the policies and decisions that hopefully the President will make with only the good of the country and the majority in mind.
Such a vision should first make clear what kind of country Filipinos want and need, beyond merely saying that they want a prosperous Philippines at peace with itself. In crafting that vision, a commitment to the full realization of national independence; the political empowerment of the poor and the hitherto marginalized (among these the Muslim community and other non-Christian groups); the transformation of the Philippine countryside through authentic land reform are essential elements. These are the basic policy commitments that can release the dormant energies and creative potential of vast sectors of the populace, fuel productivity, and sustain any momentum for change.
It will not do to stay within the safe and conventional parameters that for decades have not only failed to address the country’s problems, but also made them worse. Rather is this the time to strike out on new, untried paths. The following weeks should demonstrate whether Mrs. Arroyo is indeed the President for these desperate times that the country so urgently needs—or whether what Filipinos are hearing from her is merely more of the same rhetoric, much of it insincere, that they’ve heard before.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, January 11, 2003)