Still personal

I am severely tempted, 12 years after this editorial was written and published, to remonstrate myself and say, "Look who's talking." Entertained no end by the ongoing longest US presidential campaign ever, I find myself leaning toward specific candidates.

I admit: Not because of the issues. After all, I'm not an American voter. And while I may be familiar with the issues facing the American electorate, I am hardly an expert on them. I also feel no passion for any of those issues, except for the Iraq war, the stupidity and arrogance of which are pure and vintage Americana. As a former journalist who was already in media during the Vietnam war, I refuse to let some Americans think I can be conned.

Any explanations--not excuses--for how I feel personally about one or two of today's US presidential candidates? Of course! Don't a few of them bring you right back to the '60s and '70s, complete with the stirring buzz words and ringing phrases of those decades, when candidates would shout them out on the campaign trail in hopes of whipping up voter mania that would carry them to the comfort and luxury of high office?

Perhaps because I'd seen and heard them before--even included some of them in my reportage--it is easy to recognize the sound of ephemera. Only the young still get so moved by ringing oratory that they forget to scrutinize specific programs, platforms, and accomplishments.

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Editorial, The Evening Paper
Issue of 2 May 1995

The election fever heats up as we near the homestretch of the campaign period. With only a week to go to E-Day, the desperate phase is on for all candidates seeking elective positions.

No wonder one sees nothing but candidates' posters wherever one looks. No wonder all everybody can talk about are the coming elections.

The local contests are obviously more exciting to the localities concerned, as the Nueva Ecija killing has proven beyond doubt. But it is still true that the senatorial contest will command the electorate's attention nationwide, especially now that certain realignments seem to have been forged as part of some party strategists' last-minute protective moves.

Even the survey-takers are engaged among themselves in a silent struggle for credibility and prominence. The Social Weather Station of the Ateneo de Manila University and the Social Development Research Center of De La Salle University have provided contrasting projections of senatorial results: 10-2 from the SWS; 7-5 from De La Salle. Add to that President Fidel V. Ramos's favorite equation: 12-0.

Which leaves us with a most confusing task ahead of us. How, indeed, will our own personal number combinations shape the future Philippine Senate?

In a political environment where party ideologies do not count for much and one politician can switch from one party to another without too much agonizing, how one combines the names that will add up to a 12-man/woman Senate slate perhaps does not matter.

It will be just as easy, and as valid, for us to vote on the basis of surveys, of presidential persuasion, of personal favorites, as on the basis of party politics.

Many have already decided in favor of personalities--that is, those whose policies and politics come closest to their own, regardless of party affiliation.

It does not reflect adversely on the President, or on the opposition, or even on the electorate themselves. It simply underscores the fact that, yes, in the Philippine setting, parties are interchangeable.

For Filipino voters, only one landmark is clear. And until we reach a level of political sophistication that will allow us to judge candidates on the basis of what their political parties stand for, the landmark is still the candidates' very personal political styles.

-- NBT

The market within

Everything here that I cite, statistics that I mention, realities that I allude to--these were all widely known when I wrote this piece in 1995. They were not secret statistics nor hidden prognoses. They were not unavailable road maps. They were all out there in the open media.

Today, we see clearly the Asian countries that had taken the information, processed it into working knowledge, and applied it to their own economies. Thailand has suffered temporary political turbulence, but the whole country--whoever the man on top and whatever his title--has already internalized the capitalist lifestyle and, from all indications, will no longer depart from it. Vietnam is Asean heir apparent, able to blend Western dynamism and Asian grandeur. Cambodia tags along, a little more slowly perhaps, but certain to get there just the same. All of them, I'm afraid to say, ahead of the Philippines.

The greatest wonder of them all? China, without a doubt. Each Chinese city is a total market, so infinitely exciting to Western capital and industry, to global tourists and consumers. Yes, including us Asians. Only 28 years since Chinese leader Deng Xiao-ping directed his country toward the path to economic reform and 35 years since the late US President Richard Nixon shook hands in Beijing with Mao Zedong, China has cemented its place as the world's emerging trade giant. Now fully awake to its potential, it can--if it so wishes--step over everybody else.

The Philippines? We missed our chance in the late '50s and '60s. Had we worked hard at it, we could at least have ensured a dignified life for all Filipinos. How sad that not one of our leaders ever successfully pursued--or wanted to pursue--a total development view.

____________________

Editorial Page column, The Evening Paper
Issue of 18 April 1995

In the span of two decades--argued against the timelessness of infinity, it is not even the twinkling of an eye (as the cliché goes)--Asia registered growth rates that overwhelmed the whole world. Was it not only a decade ago that US and then-Soviet leaders were proclaiming the coming of age of the Asia-Pacific century?

The rocket-propelled growth of the region in the decades of the '70s and '80s reduced the number of East Asia's chronically poor population from 400 million to 180 million, even as 2/3 parallel population growth was also registered. By IMF estimates, of the $7.5 trillion (in 1990 dollars) by which gross world product in 2000 should exceed that of 1990, half would come from East Asia, according to The Economist (1993 figures).

The World Bank said it differently but came to much the same conclusion: Between now and 2000, Asia will contribute half of the growth in world trade, even as it accounts for 3.5 billion of the world's total population of 6.2 billion.

More than 1 billion Asians--almost the entire combined population of North America, South America, and the European Union today--will be living in households with consumer-spending power, while more than 400 million will have disposable incomes at least equal to 1993's rich-world average.

Said The Economist: It creates "some of the biggest business and financial opportunities in history."

Some other time, we can trace the history of Asia's revolutionary growth and examine each move in this brilliant two-decade economic turnaround. That's another story for another day.

For now, let us concentrate on Asia today. Skeptics may well say The Economist's figures are two years old. Much could have happened since then to turn Asia's clock sadly back.

But the Asian Development Bank does not think so. In its annual "Outlook" report, released only this month, the bank said the Asia-Pacific region will enjoy high economic growth in 1995-96.

The newly industrialized territories--Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan--will register at least 6.7 percent annual growth in 1995 and 1996. The developing nations of Asia will post 7.6 and 7.4 percent gross domestic product growth in 1995 and 1996, respectively.

The Bank's reasons for optimism: the continuing flow of foreign capital to developing Asian nations, fueling continued economic growth, and the sound macroeconomic policies that will prevent countries in the region aspiring for NIChood from going the way of Mexico.

Of course, the Bank also issues the usual caveat, especially to Asia's countries-in-a rush: these economies must upgrade their manufacturing bases (italics ours) because, whether these countries like it or not, lower-wage suppliers are ready to challenge them with the usual come-ons (price, quality, delivery) in the export markets they consider theirs.

You may question the source of that optimism. The ADB, a bank that services the region, has to be optimistic about Asia: Is it not its raison d'etre?

Those who seek a more global authority may want to take it from the World Trade Organization (WTO). In its report on world trade, also released earlier this month, WTO took special note of the growth of Asian exports in both volume and value terms in 1994. In value, Asian exports totaled $1.10 trillion, or a rise of 15.2 percent over 1993. WTO also included eight Asian countries among the world's leading trading nations, covering both exports and imports. Among these leading Asian traders: Japan, China, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand.

Is it only an accident that these six countries are also NICs or aspiring NICs? Or is there merit in my firm belief, which I expressed at a farewell given by colleagues in the international trade publishing group that I was then leaving for The Evening Paper with the prospect of writing on trade and helping local exporters, that global trade remains the engine for national economic growth--if only we can pursue it with true discipline down the production line?

But I am straying away from my original thesis today: that Asia is now too big and too tempting a market for Filipino exporters, who may still be passionately running after America and Europe, to ignore. And unless our local exporters start looking at Asian markets, they may find themselves a little too late again in reaping the fruits of the revolution--surely, the Filipinos' sad story.

Already, manufacturers in neighboring countries are tapping the billion-plus consumers within Asia itself, including us. Just go around our supermarkets, department stores, and duty-free shops. They are all awash with electronics goods or breakfast cereals from Malaysia, glassware from Turkey, soft towels from Taiwan, silk from South Korea, canned fruits from Indonesia and Singapore, and everything else from China.

These supplier countries are all looking inward now, within their own region. As an exporter from China once told me, "Too much trouble keeping up with Americans' funny quotas."

China itself is both a supply and consumer market: 16 million affluent consumers with per-capita incomes of $1,000-$4,000 (1993 figures). By 2000, the number of China's consumers with spending capacity should rise to 150 million.

In the Shanghai-Guangzhou area, consumers are willing to pay for anything imported and with a foreign brand name--plus, of course, the quality they hope goes with the products. In Shanghai, new concrete-and-glass, Western-style department stores and shopping complexes are rising, seemingly overnight.

The town of Zhuhai (the special economic zone bordering Macau), for example, with its population of 800,000, is base to more than 2,600 foreign-invested projects, some of them producing high-tech goods. The new wealth, especially in the hands of Zhuhai's yuppies, is translating into eagerness for trendy imports.

And for those who are afraid of dealing with the humongous China market, there's South Korea and Taiwan, once known only as suppliers to consumers in the developed world. Both are now sizable consumer markets for imported goods. Taiwan is one of the world's 25 richest countries.

As for South Korea, its department stores have begun to target reasonably priced, midrange imports. With the country's distribution markets liberalized in 1993, some South Korean retailers have branched out from the cities to the provinces, attracting shoppers with lower-priced imports from the country's developing neighbors.

Why shouldn't some of those goods come from the Philippines?

-- NBT

Women's world

Whenever I meet any of those women who treat the woman issue with such seriousness, I usually just smile. I have never felt a personal need to adopt the gender issue as a serious crusade. Many women columnists have taken on gender equality with great passion, devoting column after column to the various issues under the subgroup, taking on the campaign for fairness and equality with men as their life advocacy.

I am afraid I cannot join them in their crusade. I am comfortable in my own skin. I do not think I am unequal with themen. I have always done my best and been allowed to be the best I can be--as me. I don't intend to demand equal opportunities with men in pursuits that do not appeal to the essential me.

I certainly don't want to be the family breadwinner, unless the most drastic of circumstances demand that I be. In which case, as an editor, the inequity will not be between me and a man but between me and a foreigner. I certainly don't want to have to change a flat tire simply because I believe I should be the equal of all male drivers. I don't want the opportunity to be an F1 driver: They can have the experience; let me be the excited, happy spectator. And I certainly want to be able to assume the flaky-woman role in front of a man whenever I want to, totally uncaring whether or not he thinks I am intellectually inferior--better, in fact, if he thinks at first that I am intellectually inferior.

I have never felt a man was unfair to me because I am a woman. If I have ever felt unfairness--and yes, I have felt it many times--it was because I was Filipino (not Filipina), because I was middle-class, because I didn't have enough money, because I preferred not to accept a particular challenge. Also, because I didn't want to stoop down to a certain level or to rise above it.

The gender issue has never been primary to me because there's another issue that will always be more important to me. I grew up with a front-seat view of poverty in the Philippines. From as far back as I can remember, we had gasoline boys and housemaids. From as far back as I can remember, we had millionaire relatives and wealthy, wealthy friends. Even now, I don't look at them all and segregate them into unequal men and unequal women. I look at them all and see unequal people.

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Editorial, The Evening Paper
Issue of 25 August 1995

A star witness taking French leave for a breath of fresh air. A troubled housewife flying over the EDSA-Ortigas interchange. An American wife being warned she may not be woman enough for Beijing because she happens to be US First Lady. And Muslim holy men making noises over the Beijing conference document.

For womanhood, what a life!

But the coming weekend should provide welcome pause to Filipino women as the days bring them closer to the United Nations International Conference on Women and as their own actions afford them the glory of empowerment.

Jessica Alfaro should be the first to savor the sweet taste of woman power. She has had us all--men and women alike--in the grip of a secret more complicated than a Chinese puzzle. She alone (except, she says, for a tabloid columnist, and he only to support) knew why she left her safe quarters at the NBI building; she alone knew why she returned. She will not divulge more, and who are we that she should tell us? She is woman enough to keep her peace and break it only when she desires. How like a woman, indeed, and let no man sneer: Her personality adds its own intriguing chemistry to an event that has held a nation in thrall for four years.

The woman who leapt to her gruesome end gets only a cameo role, a short stint in the sunlight. Still, for the small circle of people touched by her brief and dazzling appearance--those who knew her and those who personally witnessed the finality of her choice against life--the impact can be no less. Again, who has the right to blame anybody, to explain the unexplainable, to damn the dead? The whole mystery has never been one where she has now gone.

What they all force on First Ladies, you wouldn't believe. To demand that Hillary Clinton should not go to an international conference on women (for which she possesses every credential, honors and foibles alike) in sensitivity to the state of Sino-American relations is really the height. A lesson resides there for us who think all that power, prestige, and influence spell freedom. Nobody is more captive, indeed, than she who has all that power, prestige, and influence.

As for a 1,000-year-old bastion of Islam in Egypt, it has certainly closed its doors to the Beijing women's conference. According to the Islamic institution Al-Azhar, the conference aims to create a new kind of life contrary to religious values, and to destroy moral barriers and deeply rooted traditions. Al-Azhar has reiterated that Islam does not discriminate against women. What the effect of such a pronouncement will be on many fundamentalist Muslim women can only be suspected. Will they submit in complete assent, or go to Beijing in dissent?

Who can tell? Each case above partakes of its own dimensions, both human and woman. We want to subscribe to a gender-free world where not even the word gender exists. Yet, women's minds, hearts, and spirits are obviously very different from those of the others.

No wonder Senator Francisco Tatad, hoping to make it in a committee on women, must, in their company, look askance at a world he cannot even start to understand.

-- NBT

Using aid

Is there aid to use? It is obvious how much harder it is today to get our share of global aid. The rich world's attention span when it comes to lending money to the poor world is often just as short as a child's. Why else does the world cheer a Bono, or a Buffett, or the Gates couple? Why has philanthropy by the rich become news? Why else is Africa such a raging sore?

Traditional lending institutions have become ineffective, partly because they are not getting enough of the product they are supposed to sell: money. The money of the world's rich countries is going to wars, to armaments, to their own industrialists. Can we still get money from the world's rich?

Do we need to? I go to my hometown, which now calls itself a city, more often these days. Such a different hometown now: mud and water and dirt on the streets, floods at high tide and during the typhoon season, dirty and polluted rivers, nonstop growth of squatter communities surrounded by garbage and rickety shanties.

I doubt that we can get aid from anybody to fix my hometown. I doubt even that my hometown needs aid money. What it needs are: a vision; a determination to realize that vision; and a willingness to work hard to improve, create, and produce, not for the benefit of individual pockets, but for the benefit of the place and its residents.

Sadly, the now-city's leaders since the '70s, when I left my hometown, have been totally deficient in all those.

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Editorial Page column, The Evening Paper
Issue of 17 October 1995

It is not only in food supply, especially of grains and cereals, where the world's people can anticipate major shortages as we approach the next millennium. There is one other resource crucial to development, especially of the world's poorest nations, where a shortage has already started to break: global aid.

The semiannual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the world's two largest lending institutions, last week in Washington D.C. presented the disheartening prospect of huge reductions in contributions for the International Development Association (IDA) from the United States and other rich countries of the West. The IDA is the World Bank affiliate that provides interest-free credit to very poor countries.

Funding shortfalls from donor countries to the IDA "present a very serious risk to poverty reduction and economic growth in the world's poorest countries," said members of the joint development committee of the IMF-WB in a statement released during the meeting, a signal--if ever there was one--of a threat approaching crisis proportions for the two organizations.

World Bank President James Wolfensohn, who calls the IDA the "very linchpin" of aid for the world's poor, one that serves as a foundation for other assistance, said a "weakened IDA would greatly reduce the possibility of having a stable world ... This is a very dangerous moment for IDA."

Wolfensohn's anxiety is firmly anchored. The IDA's $18-billion pool of funds set aside by rich nations for poor countries has emerged as one more political symbol in the budget battle between the Clinton administration and the Republican-controlled US Congress.

United States President Bill Clinton has asked Congress for $1.386 billion in foreign assistance funds for the fiscal year that began October 1. The House is offering only $575 million; the Senate is willing to go up to $775 million. The difference will be discussed by a conference committee, which should settle the issue before the month is over. Very few expect Clinton to get what he is asking for.

And if the United States decides to cut back on its IDA commitments, will the 233 other donor countries decide to play the same tune? After all, it would be only too easy for IDA donor countries to protest that they have their own funding problems, too, and that it is time to start focusing on their own domestic hearths and disadvantaged sectors.

******

Even in Asia, the region's--and also the world's--largest donor, Japan, has already set a ceiling on any expansion of its overseas aid budget. Suffering from periodic convulsions spawned by a recession-hit economy, natural and man-made calamities, and a runaway banking sector, Japan has deemed it prudent to cut costs.

One of the areas to get a new ceiling: the government's overseas development assistance, its ODA.

In 1995, Japan's ODA growth cap stood at 7.7 percent. In fiscal year 1987, it hit its lowest--7.5 percent. Fiscal year 1996 will set a new low: 7 percent.

What's more, the Japanese have become more discriminating about the purposes and practices resorted to by recipient countries. In effect, the Japanese are saying--oh so politely, as is their wont--that their money is being abused in many Third World countries.

Setting new guidelines of severity in the utilization of ODA funds, the Japanese have issued at least three specific policies: grants cannot be used for military purposes, there will be a definite shift away from unquestioning support for economic growth, and more allocations will go to programs that include population control and environmental protection.

These policies are intended to inhibit "inappropriate development" and persuade recipients of Japanese aid to place "greater emphasis on issues such as human rights, environmental protection, and social welfare."

New guidelines, this time issued by Japan's Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund (OECF), mandate that countries receiving yen credits submit environmental assessment reports, including studies of ways to limit the displacement of local residents and consultations with affected communities. Yen credits from the OECF carry minimal interest rates of 1-3 percent and are earmarked for infrastructure development in recipient countries.

Although admitting that many developing nations have protested against the guidelines, calling them "a form of political conditionality," Japan has remained steadfast. In September of this year, in fact, it submitted a 14-page policy paper to a 185-member UN Working Group meeting on a global economic plan of action.

The Japanese were adamant in their stand: Development aid should be "conducive to the peace and stability of a recipient country."

What would convince Japan that a borrower will use the loan money wisely? Accepting the limited--and widely divergent--capacities of the least developed countries, particularly those in Africa, the Japanese require that aid recipients improve their own domestic development resources first.

In very concrete terms, Japan wants recipient countries to cut their military budgets, collect taxes efficiently and effectively, and combat corruption in the government bureaucracy.

"This, in turn, is likely to produce an increased flow of development funding," promises the Japanese policy paper submitted to the United Nations.

******

Japan's more developed approach to aid applications was also a subject of intense deliberation by the Asian Development Bank, which depends heavily on Japanese aid for the bulk of its loan packages to member countries.

The ADB notes with increasing alarm the falling allocations in rich nations for aid and assistance. Total aid from the industrialized world fell 8 percent in 1993 to $56 billion from $61 billion in 1992. The trend does not appear ready for a change, according to ADB President Mitsuo Sato in July of this year.

With development resources for poor countries becoming "increasingly scarce," Sato stresses the need for their efficient use. ADB itself, he said, will be keeping a tighter watch on how aid money is spent by the recipient and whether it achieves maximum development impact.

But there's the rub: How can development aid be utilized to achieve maximum impact?

M. Adil Khan, an ADB consultant from Australia's University of Queensland, provides answers from a specialist's viewpoint. "Recent experiences of development management in most developing countries suggest there are growing gaps" between what is planned and what is implemented, between what is intended and the actual outcome.

Even in cases where implementation of aid-funded projects was satisfactory, such projects may not fare well in sustainability. Khan urged recipient countries to look beyond implementation and completion of aid-funded projects to their "full development impact and sustainability."

The IMF-World Bank joint development committee expressed basically the same sentiments, but in simpler, easier-to-understand terms. Their statement is something developing countries should take to the drawing boards to determine how best they can be accomplished.

IDA funds, said IMF-WB, should go to social spending and poverty-reduction programs that increase access by the poor to land, credit, and basic services that, in turn, promote broad and escalating growth and create many new jobs.

In the long run, only such aid- and assistance-funded projects can guarantee sustained development for recipient countries.

-- NBT

Election truths

We go to the polls once more in May. Will it be another useless exercise?

My memories of political exercises go back to my grade-school days in the town of Malabon, where my father--a prewar mayor of that small town--held informal caucuses with political allies in his gasoline station located right in the middle of the main street leading to the municipal building, only a few steps from the town market, the imposing church of San Bartolome, and the church-attached premier Catholic diocesan school.

My father was a loyal card-bearing member of the Nacionalista Party--so loyal governors and congressmen came to his table at fiesta time and sent huge wreaths for his wake--at a time when national politics was a battle between only two political parties, each one with its own pronounced political platform and its uncorrupted political followers.

Elections were exciting then, not for the violence and the cheating that are de rigueur these days, but for the atmosphere of total political involvement and commitment to a party and its candidates, both on the national and local levels.

After each election, the town would settle down, the politicians content to take a backseat as the real life of the small town took over again. Malabon's great fortunes were founded not on politics, but on business. Politics was only a necessary adjunct to the interisland businesses that provided the town with its legendary millionaires and their legendary family names.

If there were any politics pursued in between elections, which were held every four years, it was always quiet spadework--building up membership, manning the ramparts, working the streets and the houses to ensure the votes came in at the next election.

Town-wide, in those days, voters knew who to vote for, what their qualifications were, what records they brought with them. These days, there is none of that kind of in-your-face familiarity. Rumors abound everywhere about everybody, everybody denies every damaging or unflattering story, nobody knows the truth, nobody tells the truth.

Yes, all these in Malabon, now a city. Its politics, like the rest of the country's politics today, has gone big, strident, questionable, violent. It is no longer a small town.

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Editorial, The Evening Paper
Issue of 8 May 1995

Cast your vote for the good...

For the few remaining hours left to those who have not yet cast their votes, let them be worthwhile hours. Hours of pitiless cross-examination--of the candidates, of their qualifications, of the voters' goals, of this election's end-goals.

There are few givens that the Filipino electorate can start from.

We are a country that has been left behind by time, by contemporary events, by progress, by other developing countries. If we want to catch up, we have to work double-time, even triple-time.

Even then, we may not catch up. And catching up, remember, is only reaching our neighbors' level as of today. While we are catching up, they are already moving ahead.

We lost close to 20 years, remember?

As voters who still have to make it to the polls take the rest of the afternoon to cast their votes, and as those who have already cast their votes spend the rest of the day following the results of today's elections, let those results reflect a people's fervent prayer for grace, truth, wisdom, and deliverance.

The lessons of the past have not been so long ago that we can no longer remember them, nor so immaterial that we do not need to remember them.

They are, in fact, so memorable that we can state and restate them in words of one syllable: Let the good reign, and the bad lose.

Let those who have the interests of the people and the country in their hearts triumph, and those who have only their own personal interests, only their own wallets in their political agendas, fall by the wayside.

To defeat the second, we have to make sure that we recognize the first.

Before those of us who have already voted even made it to the polling places, they should have thoroughly studied all the candidates for national and local offices, gone over their backgrounds and experiences with a fine-toothed comb, and determined which ones could best contribute to the country's catch-up efforts.

There are candidates who talk a lot of sense but really do nothing; their records will prove they spent the past years in office or out of it doing just that: talking.

On the other hand, there are candidates whose words may falter but whose deeds are direct and purposeful. Are those deeds focused on the people, the improvement of community and society? Or are the actions inward-looking, directed toward their own personal aggrandizement and not the people's?

We have always thought that, shorn of emotion and prejudice, bereft of personal attachment or gain, each and every thinking voter will not find the choice between various candidates such a difficult task.

Each candidate brings with him a composite biodata, so to speak, a picture of his past that will guide us in making an educated judgment of his present and future--and therefore of his constituents' present and future.

Studying that composite, complete picture of each candidate's past is the best technique for intelligent voting.

...and protect it

But the problem extends beyond casting your vote at your polling booth (if you are lucky enough to find it). As every election enthusiast is fond of warning, "Your responsibility does not end with your vote."

In fact, the hours after the polling booths close are even more critical hours. Those are the hours that separate the innocent from the depraved.

Has it not become a visual cliché of Philippine elections, those photographs of civilians of various stripes protecting ballot boxes at risk to their lives, to defend the rightful will of the electorate?

As the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting declared over a radio program yesterday, there are many more processes that follow between the casting of a ballot and the recognition of the rightful winners of an election. In fact, it may even happen that the rightful winners never get to sit and serve. This is no longer an oddity in Philippine politics.

Unfortunately, this is often the hardest part of the voting exercise, the one that demands the greatest devotion and persistence.

Guarding the faithful reflection of one's political decision demands that Filipino voters give a little more of their time to policing the exercise.

We hear of the increasing number of religious, social, and civic organizations who are getting involved in post-poll activities, and we are glad. We wish more of the silent majority will join these organizations.

But each Filipino voter should also be sure that these organizations do not have political agendas of their own, that they do not have political favorites.

That is another task that devolves to each individual voter. For ultimately, each Filipino's vote is his own. It is his to cast--and his to protect.

-- NBT

'Clean and green'

I love going to the countryside. To me, the country is home to the two coolest hues in the spectrum of color: blue and green.

The blue of the skies, at times clear and brilliant, at other times greyish and forbidding. The blue-green of water, burbling in brooks and streams, singing in rivers, lapping against sand, impenetrable in lakes, frothing angry or playful from beaches overlooking the infinite. The blue-green of mountains, majestic in the distance, a reminder of scenes and sights of my past, now permanently alive only in my mind's eye, sentimental places and memories already beyond revisiting. The green of forests and trees, of meadows and gardens, of potted plants and tiny leaves.

Since the end of my journalistic career allowed me to encourage my creative ambitions, I traveled the nooks and crannies of the serene towns and barrios of the provinces to the south of Metro Manila--Quezon, Batangas, Laguna.

As I drove away from the towns to the rural areas and wildernesses of this region, I would imprint in my mind the images of idyllic country life: old-style farmhouses ringed by mango and coconut trees, with the occasional carabao or horse or even free-range chickens lazing about, smoke billowing from outhouses; huge plantations protected by stone walls from the streets, with only their rooftops visible through heavy canopies of trees; unprofessionally but heartily landscaped gardens surrounding schoolhouses lying motionless in the sun. And always--always!--water in rivers and streams, flowing down from hills and mountains through irrigation canals to join up with the lake and the sea beyond.

In these places, "cool and green" continues to be an appropriate description. But no longer in Metro Manila or in other highly urbanized localities, where buildings eat up parks, centuries-old trees are cut, and squatters gleefully pollute waterways with the wastes of their miserable existence--and all with government approval!

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Editorial, The Evening Paper
Issue of 14 November 1995

The giggles from youngsters watching the television coverage of a recently concluded beauty contest, held in a mountain resort up north, were all too audible when one contestant came up with her "clean and green" impression of the Philippines. She must have picked up the phrase, quite automatically, from intermittent posters on zigzagging routes to the resort, or along the mountain city's roadways, totally unaware of the fact that the Philippines, whether on the ground or from the air, has long ceased to be clean and green. In fact, even the mountain resort where the beauty contest was held had long ago turned into pathetic brown.

Nor is Metro Manila looking any younger and crisper. It looks, to be kind about it, decidedly old and faded. A tourist traveling down Metro Manila streets is bound to bring home with him contrasting images of the Filipino people's respect, or lack of, for his environment.

On the one hand, you can look out from Makati's high-rise buildings and see stretches of green parks and tree-shaded thoroughfares, including parts of Gil Puyat Avenue and Paseo de Roxas. Outside Makati, one can still find tree-shaded streets in older communities like San Juan and Mandaluyong. Nor should we forget the welcome canopy of age-old trees, their branches joined, over the streets of New Manila.

On the other hand, the concrete ribbons in the Cubao commercial district are not only gray and ugly, but also dirty and smelly. Even the celebrated flyovers, at their birth sprouting fully landscaped crawl and pedestrian spaces at EDSA level, have already lost much of their green to dust, smog and human neglect.

And the center island of Pasig's Ortigas Avenue Extension from near the Meralco Building to E. Rodriguez Avenue, which had gone to weed but was still home to fully grown though scraggly trees, has now been torn out--with the approval of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, we were adequately warned--and is being cemented to provide more road space for cars. What is being constructed right at the center is a very narrow ledge made of hollow blocks. Can we at least look forward to a future glimpse of green somewhere along this perennially traffic-clogged stretch?

Only last week, certain comments of the controversial, newly installed congressional representative from the first district of Leyte were played up in the newspapers, including her quip about Mrs. Amelita Ramos's clean and green program. We can say all things about the former first lady (Imelda Marcos), but one thing we must acknowledge is the fact that when she did, she went into the cleaning and greening of Metro Manila as if it were her life's mission--to the point of being ridiculed for creating Potemkin villages to hide the ugliness and poverty of real life.

There must be a middle ground somewhere--and a person who can lead us in mining the rich deposit of ecological concern and aesthetic commitment among the residents of Metro Manila. Sometimes, all it needs is somebody to concentrate on the job instead of taking it on as one more adjunct to an already long string of official duties and responsibilities.

Who does not dream of a really clean and green Metro Manila?

-- NBT

The idiocy of Philippine politics!

These days, it is the Bersamin murder, fruit of a simmering political war in Abra, hogging the front pages of Philippine newspapers, which cannot seem to get enough--or sell enough--of political violence and celebrity murders. When I wrote this editorial in 1995, the disputed territory was Nueva Ecija; the protagonists, the Josons and the Perezes.

At various times since our independence as a nation, other running stories headlined bloody details of shooting wars in political hot spots, involving other political clans. The return of democracy may have rid us of a dictator, but it has not rid us of aspiring future dictators. Politics has become a family business worth staking an eternal claim to, worth protecting with real lives, worth feeding with the lives of others who stupidly involve themselves and get in the way of crossed ambitions.

Perhaps the Bersamin murder will end the vicious bloodshed in Abra. Perhaps it will not. Who knows what lies deep in men's hearts? If they were really good men, wanting only to help their townspeople and provincemates, would they go into politics? And having gone into it and wallowed in the best and the worst of it, wouldn't they kill to stay in it? We'd be stupid if we didn't know the answer to that.

____________________

Editorial, The Evening Paper
Issue or 26 April 1995

The statement is stark and needs no further explanation: there are more than 2,000 firearms still loose in Nueva Ecija.

Do we wonder that an encounter such as the one that exploded between Governor Joson and Mayor Perez on Saturday afternoon could take place? In broad daylight? Before an election? When a gun ban is supposed to be in force?

Is this not the ultimate insult for an electorate that, like the world's worst fools, never stops wishing and praying for fair and free polls every election year? That never stops hoping that the baseline of "keeping the peace" will at least be met by people in authority?

How dare a PNP regional director calmly announce that they have allowed 2,000 firearms to remain loose in an acknowledged political hot spot?

We are told the protagonists in the violent encounter had their armed bodyguards exempted from the election gun ban. Given the bloody history of these two families' decades-old feud, how could the Comelec have allowed such a situation to prevail?

Anybody could see it was a murder waiting to be committed--by one, by two, by both, by anybody! Allowing them all to carry firearms, when everybody knew that emotions would be running high and vengeance would go to the fast and not necessarily to the just (as who can still trace who is the just in such a convoluted tale of only-less-than-Shakespearean length?), would have been the height of naivete. After the Espinosa ambush, the dice would already have been loaded against peace in such violent terrains.

As, indeed, it turned out to be: a gruesome killing scene played out against a faux-Hollywood landscape.

Except that, in this case, there is very real blood, very real killing, very frightening violence. And the perpetuation of a feud that can go on until the end of the world. The widow takes up the gauntlet, the brothers plot out their countermoves, and the followers--yes, the unthinking followers--line up, there on the highways and the town plazas of their hometown, like cowboys in a forgotten Western, to willingly sacrifice their lives, their families, and their future on the altar of politics.

We are told the whole scenario is unavoidable. We are told the debts have to be paid, the revenge to be extracted, the future to be plotted out by feuding political warlords because that is the nature of the lives they have been fated to live out.

Was it also unavoidable that our police officials should allow loose firearms in the thousands in Nueva Ecija, scattered like kites waiting to be picked up by boys pretending they are men and leaders? Was it also unavoidable that the Comelec should join in the macabre fun and give such violence-prone politicians the authority that the very possession of metal gives so they can freely stage their own bloody games?

No wonder the "bad boy of Philippine movies" has the gall to offer himself for election to national office! In his natural habitat, he begins to look no more infantile than the rest of everybody else. He may even reap the whirlwind from this cardboard scene.

The idiocy of Philippine politics!

-- NBT

Food picture 1995

Organization, consolidation, planning, management: these are not our strong points as a people. We lack a forward, future view. We do not care for anticipation, originality of approach, ingenuity. We don't talk about global issues until they stare us in the face, or on TV and the Internet. We are not only insular in orientation, we also do not care for full-scale, full-time study and specialization.

If we expect doctors to devote their whole lives to continuing study in their specialized fields, why shouldn't we demand the same from economists, government administrators, public officials, urban planners, scientists, academicians, and everybody else--including industrialists and capitalists--with a responsibility toward the efficient running of the various threads of national life?

And don't we have the right to demand that if they fail to measure up, then they should be exposed for the lightweights that they are and immediately dismissed?

____________________

Editorial, The Evening Paper
Issue of 21 August 1995

First came the pork crisis, followed by the rice shortage. Then, problems with sugar and bangus fry. Now, we're getting warnings about a future shortage of cattle stock.

There's also red tide in our seas, pollution in our lakes and bays. For a while, vegetables were reported to be laced with formalin. Price controls were imposed on basic necessities as prices rose. Will our food problems never cease?

Remember that importing is a palliative, and a costly one at that, depriving us of substantial foreign exchange and driving the wedge of fear into the hearts of local manufacturers, who will be pursued by nightmares till the dawn of global free (not to be equated with fair) trade.

So the government is run off its feet trying to douse brush fires as and where they ignite. Senators storm rice warehouses, mobile stores sell cheap rice to kilometer-long queues, and politicians have a field day getting "shot" for the front pages of the dailies while dispensing NFA rice.

The government has now started daily nationwide inventories of basic goods, while the private sector does its own thing by sending out volunteers to do price monitoring.

With President Fidel V. Ramos out of the country, his justice secretary, Teofisto Guingona, has ordered the National Bureau of Investigation to look into a possible collusion between the National Food Authority and members of the country's rice cartel, the existence of which everybody (except perhaps Agriculture Secretary Roberto Sebastian and NFA Chairman Romeo David) knows.

Will somebody please provide us all with true, real, and authoritative national food production and consumption figures for the whole of the Philippines for 1994 and 1995? And has the government projected food production and consumption versus population, at least for the immediate years to come?

Or will 1996 and the rest of our future, just like our food picture circa 1995, be left to the far from tender mercies of the usual suspects: unplanned growth, unprepared development, uninformed bureaucrats?

-- NBT

Interesting facts of development

Emerging markets, regional growth areas, food crises, poverty, microlending. These were development concerns a decade ago. They are still development concerns today.

Asia was hot in the late 1980s--including the Philippines, which the CEO of the global trade publishing house I was working for at the time described, as they moved a whole group's editorial base from Hong Kong to Manila, as "an exciting place; it reminds me of Hong Kong 20 years ago." Unfortunately, Manila was supplanted barely five years after, before even the 2000s, by Shenzhen and, very soon after, by the rest of China.

Now, China has ceased to be emerging to the world, only to the people in its rural areas who have yet to get to the veritable dream factories that are Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and practically every other Chinese city.

The late 1990s were coming-out years for Africa, energized by a very supportive Pax Europeana. But in Africa's wake came the wars, the droughts, the violence, the displacement of peoples. Bono had to stage world concerts to raise funds for the continent while George Clooney and Don Cheadle used their star value to call attention to the painful tragedy of Darfur.

One hopes, more than anything else, that the affluent and influential in every country will use their ginormous resources on projects that will truly teach the poor how to rise above their situation.

Unfortunately, most of the time, the rich and powerful prefer to wear shades that allow them to disregard the poverty around them even as they rally for more abstract, more personal, or more vengeful concerns.

____________________

Editorial Page column, The Evening Paper
Issue of 28 September 1995

At the opening of the Philippine summit yesterday, President Ramos cautioned summit participants about the possibility that they could miss the Philippine bus. However, our bus isn't the only one poised to depart. In this part of the world, even Burma is dusting off its rickety old wagon for the long trip to economic development.

There are, of course, trillions of dollars flying electronically through the capital markets of the world, but short-term deposits and no-commitment investors can spell doom rather than boom, as Mexico has sadly learned in past months.

The kind of investors we need are those who, like James Rogers Jr. said of the country he has chosen to sink his dollars into: "There is a chance it could explode ... But that wouldn't cause me to sell." Unfortunately, Rogers--who teaches finance at Columbia University, is a business commentator on the CNBC cable network, and was a former partner of Hungarian billionaire investor George Soros--wasn't talking about the Philippines. Rogers was talking about Africa, the latest, much ballyhooed emerging market.

At a forum for American investment bankers at the New York Stock Exchange, Rogers downgraded Latin America ("sure to devalue"), Asia ("not as hot as it was"), and Russia and Eastern Europe ("too much in turmoil"). Africa is "it. I'm the biggest fan of Africa in the room," said Rogers. "Whether you're a hairdresser or an investment banker, things are so exciting."

Rogers said he has investments throughout the continent--Ghana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana--though South Africa is particularly hot. Of course, there are problem spots: Nigeria, Zaire, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola. But the secret in making market choices, said Rogers, is the people: "You don't invest in a country unless the people have changed."

A lesson there for us, surely?

******

Despite Rogers' spirited promotion of Africa, one cannot just dismiss Asia. Not the capital cities, this time, but the former-backwaters-turned-aspiring-growth-areas. There's EAGA down south, and another one up north.

The latest to make a pitch for growth is a six-nation stretch through which one of the longest rivers in the world runs. The Mekong six--China, Thailand, Laos, Burma, Vietnam, and Cambodia--have called attention to the vast investment potential of this relic of Vietnam-war memories.

The area through which the river runs is perhaps one of the most remote and untouched territories in Asia. Only its Vietnam portion, the Mekong Delta, shows any sign of development because the Vietcong needed the area to help fund their war bill. Only one bridge, the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge, spans the 4,350-kilometer waterway.

Now, with the help of the Asian Development Bank, the Mekong six want to finalize a framework of cooperation that will provide a road network all along the Mekong River basin. Eventually, a package of tourism and hydroelectric projects may be offered to investors.

Growth areas are mushrooming throughout Asia, bringing countries and governments together in a common pursuit. But the effort can be altogether dangerous, leading to mistakes that impact most, and worst, on the very people targeted as beneficiaries of development. At every step of such undertakings, there must be one running thread, one enduring guideline: sustainable growth.

******

A real wheat crisis may well have begun, with the scramble for supplies spurring panic buying, especially by African countries where bread is the staple. Even as wheat stocks reached their lowest levels in 20 years, prices shot through the roof at the Chicago futures pit, the world's largest wheat market.

Egypt, the world's second biggest wheat importer, snapped up American wheat and is eyeing Australian wheat ready for harvest in December. Algeria and Jordan need wheat by November; drought-hit Morocco, by December.

With production of other cereals similarly projected at levels well below what is required, the time may have come for all countries to encourage paradigm shifts in the production and consumption of food.

******

On another subject I had touched on a few times in the past--small loans for women--here are the latest so far.

In Cambodia, the sponsoring organization--the US Agency for International Development--will be funneling the funds through the Catholic Relief Services, which in turn will work with three district-based nongovernmental organizations to provide loans to rural women through 78 village banks. Cambodian women will be charged rates of 4-5 percent per month against loan-shark rates of 20-30 percent.

In China, one remote district bank in the northwest, a branch of the state-owned Agricultural Bank of China, has been pioneering in the concept and attesting to the high rate of repayment. "Shanxi is the first ... province to give cheap loans to rural women who live in poor counties to help them become better off," said Yan Dianshan, vice chairman of the Women's Federation of Shanxi.

Launched as early as 1989, the program is a little different from the Grameen Bank and Women's World Banking (WWB) models. "We usually do not give money directly to poor women," said Yan. "We give them chicks, rabbits, piglets, and other materials to make it easy for them to repay. Or we lend money to better-off women responsible for poverty-relief work for poorer women." The loans, in cash or kind, carry a 2.4-percent interest and are repaid in three years.

The nonprofit WWB has found low-income women the best credit risk in the world. "Their repayment rate is 95-98 percent, better than that of large clients of commercial banks," said WWB's president, Nancy Barry, who was in Beijing for last month's women's conference.

So dedicated is Barry to the concept of micro-lending that she has been trying to negotiate through the obscure Chinese structure, attempting to find a route by which to expand WWB into China.

-- NBT

Have we learned the lessons of war?

On hindsight, this should have been titled "Haven't we learned the lessons of war?"

How long did it take the US to get out of Vietnam? Did the US have the moral right to invade Vietnam? Now the US is in Iraq. Did the US have the moral right to invade Iraq? And they are surprised that unspeakable violence is spawned by wars?

____________________

Editorial, The Evening Paper
Issue of 28 April 1995

For practically the whole of April, and maybe even well into May, morning newspapers, as well as The Evening Paper, ran reminiscences, eyewitness accounts, analyses, and investigations of the personalities, events, and situations that led to the culmination of two of this century's most gut-wrenching conflicts: World War II and the Vietnam War.

The first observes this month the 50th anniversary of its end, the second the 20th. Both wars seared the affected generations as never before, and set into motion global reactions of unparalleled proportions.

World War II carved up the European continent according to ideological, rather than racial or geographic, lines. It also propelled the world into a new economic structure, with the United States on top of the totem pole, followed by the very powers that lost militarily but triumphed economically: Germany and Japan.

The Vietnam War caused the United States to undergo a spiritual catharsis as painful as the emotional one, and endangered the very stability and sanity of the American people. Today, US assumption of the leading role in another war not its own has put in question its moral authority over the rest of the world.

At the risk of being repetitive, we hope everybody will take these twin anniversaries as occasion to remember a wise man's warning: that those who do not know their history are bound to repeat it.

These days, all over the world, wars continue. People die, combatants as well as civilians. Governments order whole-scale decimation of rival communities, rival societies. Armaments of war are sold, transported, used. New and more potent weapons are invented, developed, stored. If guns and bombs cannot guarantee the death of the enemy, then the human body itself is employed, the ultimate death weapon.

At no other time in the history of the world have so many people been so committed to the ends of war, bloodshed, violence.

Such commitment will not necessarily lead to a war of such magnitude as World War II or of such anguish as the Vietnam War. But commitment of such intensity is bound to divide the human race according to even more complex lines.

Where nation-states no longer command loyalty; where ideology, race, and religion get pitted against each other; where the common weal no longer reigns supreme, the lines blur and the conflicts multiply.

The hopes for peace that flowered with the end of the Cold War are already wilting under regimes controlled by intense and unmitigated hatred. And where no power--superpower or superorganization--is able to wield moral authority, the future routes and forms that war can take become truly frightening.

Is this the world mankind went through three major wars in this century to shape? Is this the kind of world we want to leave to the generations of the 21st century?

-- NBT

Thank you, Abe Peck

As you go over this column piece, you will read Abe Peck's credentials in full. But let me tell you the circumstances surrounding the short but meaningful (to me, anyway!) connection between Abe and me.

I had just voluntarily closed one more chapter in my seemingly strike-anywhere media career--this time as regional executive editor of a lifestyle magazine with Asian editorial and marketing offices--when I saw a classified advertisement for an editor with experience in managing a regional editorial network. My application actually traveled a circuitous route, which I plan to detail in another of my three blogs. The net result was that I was recruited into the extremely challenging world of global trade journalism.

It was, looking on my whole career in hindsight, the most exciting phase of my intellectual growth. I never thought my brain cells could soak up so much primary, secondary, tertiary, peripheral data, details, knowledge, information, even rumor. Never in my history of working for local media did I ever feel as intellectually alive as when I was editor of one of the global sourcing magazines of an international trade media group.

Abe Peck made it easier for somebody like me, who built an OK enough name in the world of local mainstream media, to do acceptable work in the more faceless, more demanding, more information-overloaded but definitely less-byline-conscious discipline that is trade journalism.

And by the way, look at the magazines on the shelves of our local bookstores today. Most of the titles you will see are titles that confirm what Abe Peck and his fellow first-world journalism professors teach: There is no substitute for studying, knowing, focusing on, and targeting your subject area and your potential market before and during the life of your magazine. Then perhaps you will not have to worry about your magazine's after-life.

____________________

Editorial Page column, The Evening Paper
Issue of 16 November 1995

It was the first week of November in 1992 and the fourth day of a week-long editorial training seminar. I had doodled my way through the first day, when editors of the different publications delivered their annual state-of-the-magazine speeches. A series of talks by publishers and top honchos followed on the second and third days. Except for the insights on repositioning, redesigning, and regionalizing magazines, I had found no other subjects worth staying awake for.

Outside the French doors of the second-floor function room at the Hong Kong Marina Club, a balcony overlooked the posh yachts elegantly taking in the sun on Aberdeen's calm waters. My eyes were often turned to the looming hulk of earth nearby, bluish-green and lush with trees, where every now and then I would seek the thin ribbon of brown wound around the mountain, evidence of human life even at such imperial heights.

I wished urgently for a day out in the bracing mountain air and sun instead of endless hours listening to lectures on subjects I always thought any journalist knew as well as his name and occupation: improving your headlines, writing attention-getting subheads and blurbs, captions and their relationship to pictures.

By the fourth day, I had reached the end of my patience. Seeking a whispered moment with the seminar director, I asked him almost desperately: "Abe, will you please explain to me why we are discussing topics we--all the editors here--should have mastered in journalism school?"

******

Learning from a former colleague early this week that Abe Peck was in town, I knew I had to write this little piece about him. I can hear your questions: Who is Abe Peck? Abe who?

Abe Peck is a professor at Northwestern University in Illinois, chairman of magazine studies at the University's Medill School of Journalism, and director of the National Arts Journalism Program sponsored by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Those credentials, while impressive enough, are only three items in his long and glorious CV.

As magazine studies chairman at Medill, he directs six full-time professors and about 10 adjunct instructors. I know Abe enough to say that his baby is the graduate magazine-publishing program, which shapes, directs, instructs, and babysits graduate students through the critical business of launching original publications.

But Abe is more than the magazine program at Medill. He teaches the graduate program's writing and editing course, is a member of the dean's strategic planning committee and the school's curriculum, search, and promotion and tenure committees. Every year, together with the school's placement office, he hosts Medill's annual Magazine Jobs Fair.

Outside Medill, Abe Peck's byline has appeared in such magazines as Rolling Stone (where he has been associate or contributing editor since 1975), Esquire, GQ, Advertising Age, Library Quarterly. He has been or is still consultant to, organizes workshops and seminars for, is strategic and editorial adviser to, or serves on the advisory boards of the ABA Journal, American Medical News, Cahners Publishing, Crain Communications, Eaton Corp., Johnson Hill Press, Kalmbach Publishing, Restaurants and Institutions, Abbott Laboratories, Eastman Kodak, Whittle Communications, The Smithsonian, Cowles Magazines, Asian Sources Media Group, and a slew of US national and regional editors', magazines', and publishers' associations.

He has judged for both the National Magazine and Jesse Neal awards, and is an instructor on magazine startups for the Folio conference held annually in Chicago. Entries on Abe appear in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in Education, and Who's Who in the World.

******

You say all that would have been easy to get from a two-page write-up. But more difficult, though certainly more lasting, were very personal lessons from three formal training sessions and informal sit-ins with Abe.

There I was at the Marina Club in 1992, feeling bored by all the discussions about things we all should have learned in journalism school, except that the British, Scottish, Indian, American, Chinese, and Filipino editors with me were not all journalism graduates: the majority, in fact, were technicians-- engineers, mechanics, IT and marketing executives.

It was not long after that November 1992 seminar that I admitted they may not know as much as I do about journalism, but they certainly knew more than I did about the industries our international magazines covered and, as a result, may have communicated more effectively with their readers.

Where many Filipino publications are weak is often where Filipino editors and publishers erroneously believe they are strong. Created from the feeble materials of whimsy, wish fulfillment, personal ambition, or a pipe dream, a new Filipino magazine makes a great, big splash at birth, only to die from an excess of misdirected and indiscriminate love only a few issues after. Others hang on, offsetting losses with profits from other businesses, but never quite making it to awards nights, citations of excellence, halls of fame--or readers' attention, either.

I remember one particular session, again on a beautiful November week, also at the Marina Club, but this time a year after, when Abe presented a video package of an original magazine launch by his students at Medill--for a catering magazine, I remember quite well.

Every step of the launch was documented, from the initial brainstorming, to the comprehensive industry study, to the series of market research surveys, to the circulation and advertising studies and surveys, to the preproduction and production runs. At every stage, the market was tested, reactions and responses were collected, statistics were interpreted, and very thorough presentations were made to the school and the staff. The editorial coverage was not simply the product of one man's mind or one woman's dreams; its roots were firmly planted on a firm mission statement and an educated and intelligent approach to an identified market.

******

Abe had answered the question I asked him, almost in desperation, that November day in 1992. Now, more than two years after, I have outgrown my journalistic indignation enough to accept it. Thank you, Abe Peck.

-- NBT

Keeping the peace

Filipino elections are notorious for the violence they spawn and the lives they waste. Even given the amount of vote-watching that has become a regular practice and the thousands of vote-defenders who volunteer every election time, no election passes in the country's calendar that does not toll the bell for many unfortunate souls, some even with sins as innocuous as simply wanting to indulge the Filipino vice of needing to be a bystander at every event.

I remember my mother telling me how peaceful elections were before World War II, and how the violence and deaths escalated only when Filipinos began to think they were really rulers in their own land. I think she may have been a victim of her fantasy. We just have to recall such illustrious names as Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Aguinaldo.

We're not even talking about the cheating, from lowly barangay elections to who knows what high-and-mighty level. And don't believe it when candidates insist only the other side cheats.

____________________

Editorial, The Evening Paper
Issue of 3 March 1995

Two months to go before national elections, and already the fires of dissension and fear have been more than adequately stoked. In many places, suspicions that the old practices of Philippine politics still reign supreme get bolstered, not just by dramatic events but even by brief, telling, statements.

The killing of Masbate Rep. Tito Espinosa three nights ago may have kept us glued to our radio and television sets to keep up with the details of the breaking story. How many of us, our adrenalin levels rising, sat down, at anytime that night and after, to move beyond the personal parameters of the story to the broader, more general truths behind it?

Everybody speculated--or declared themselves firmly convinced--that politics was behind the latest incident. Who does not know the running feud that has dogged well-entrenched members of the Espinosa family and their political rivals?

To think of this one family feud as a microcosm of politics, Philippine-style, and to imagine it replicated in every city and province in the country is almost mind-numbing. To those who grew up in politically prescient families, however, it is nevertheless very real.

For no other reason has the expression "guns, goons, and gold" become an accepted cliche when describing the Philippine electoral scene.

One likes to think it does not have to be so. Who would not want to be able to claim success in escaping the conditions that have spawned the wide, if passive, acceptance of that cliché? Who would not prefer a real restoration of respected democratic principles?

But as a nation, the thought seems quite unrealistic. Was it the other day when doubts were cast openly on Comelec Chairman Bernardo Pardo's grasp of the more practical aspects of Philippine politics? It makes us want to say: Hey, give the man a sporting chance!

There is, though, a grain of logic in the doubt. Presiding over the honest conduct of Philippine elections is no victory if it is done at the cost of human lives. The bottom line will always be that of keeping the peace.

-- NBT

Vietnam on a roll

If Filipinos want to indulge their masochistic sentiments and enjoy a long cry, they only have to look at Vietnam. In the '50s, in Asia, the Philippines was second only to Japan in economic and development potential. Even then, alarm bells should already have sounded for us. Japan, after all, was decimated by two atomic bombs. But we calmed ourselves then: the Philippines, too, was destroyed by a world war.

Today, we have, in a very real sense, been overtaken once more. And again by another war-torn country. Shall we console ourselves as we did before, look for excuses, and blame a rapacious dictatorship for our inability to get ahead? I did not hear the Vietnamese people officially blaming anybody--not the war, not the French, not the Americans, not the Vietcong, not the US-installed government in the South, nobody. They applied themselves to the task of picking up the pieces of a broken land and a divided people, decided to forgo the usual breast-beating and grudge-bearing, and forged today's Vietnamese miracle.

The rest of Indochina is running very close behind. The Laotians and Cambodians, no doubt inspired by the Vietnamese, are moving fast to catch up. Very soon, all of them will overtake hapless, divided, undisciplined, politicized, personalistic us.

This piece was written more than a decade ago. And yes, we have been overtaken.

____________________

Editorial, The Evening Paper
Issue of 19 April 1995

Once a world pariah, Vietnam is fast moving up the Asian trade totem pole. And guess which of the countries in the region Vietnam will soon overtake, given its new export energy.

Listen to these amazing statistics of 1995 first-quarter performance from the new boy on the world trade bloc. In the first three months of this year alone, Vietnam exported an estimated $940-million worth of goods, narrowing its quarterly trade deficit to only $85 million. Vietnam's total trade shortfall in 1994 was $900 million.

Clothing and textile exports in the first quarter of 1995 almost doubled from the same period in 1994. Coal exports rose by 56 percent and rice exports by 44 percent.

The value of Vietnam's industrial output increased by 12 percent during the first quarter of 1995, compared to the same period in 1994.

The country's most productive cities in the first three months of the year were Hanoi and Haiphong, the north's largest cities. Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, showed only modest but continuing gains.

Filipino manufacturers who want to know which Vietnamese exports are growing may take a hint from the manufactured goods with the highest increases in volume of output--light bulbs, animal feeds, textiles, bricks, cement. Output volumes for chemical fertilizers, canned vegetables, and frozen seafood decreased.

Now, these statistics would come to nothing unless we realize that, until less than three years ago, Vietnam as an exporter of acceptable goods was not even being considered by international markets.

For one, there was the active American campaign to keep Vietnamese trade on a tight embargo. For another, Vietnamese products were considered good only for domestic consumption.

Given the evidence of the above statistics, however, Vietnam appears to have leapfrogged its way to exporter status in world markets in the short space of three years. Exports worth $940 million in three months, even as an estimate, are nothing to look down on. In fact, for countries like the Philippines, which hopes to do well in the same race, Vietnam's figures should constitute a critical wake-up call.

Unless we decide we want to be an island unto ourselves--a seeming impossibility in a world that has become so small--the rest of 1995 should be, for the Philippines, serious catch-up time.

Do we want to be left behind again, another time?

-- NBT