Wednesday, February 28, 2007 Osmeña: Corruption in real estate By Antonio V. Osmeña Estatements
BUSINESS and politics go hand in hand in this country.
Political candidates need to spend millions for the positions they aspire. Although there are politicians like Serging Osmena Jr. who spend their own personal funds.
Politicians like Serging who refuse to practice graft and corruption lose all their personal wealth to politics. Serging was exiled by then President Marcos to America where he died without bequeathing anything to his heirs.
Can today’s politicians practice Serging’s legacy of good governance? Many elected officials use private donations to fund their campaign or through graft while in office. When pay back time comes, politics will no longer be concerned with the distribution of resources in an orderly fashion. What matters is who get what, where, when, how and why.
Since there is always competition for resources, politicians must always deal with groups that finance their campaigns. Because of these conflicts, politics has been called the art of the possible.
For most politicians, the “art of the possible” is focused on making their own reelection possible, primarily by not taking stand on controversial or long-range issues and by avoiding change. A favorite strategy of traditional politicians is to say, “I agree with you, but what you are suggesting is not feasible.”
Such a statement is often a smokescreen to avoid hard thinking, risk taking and real leadership. Throughout human history, however, the really important politics has been that of making the seemingly impossible – or the highly improbable – possible.
True politics, then, is the art of creating new possibilities for human progress. But today, in our country, it has caused misery on our people. As George Bernard Shaw put it, “Some see things as they are and say why? I dream of things that never were and say why not?”
But how do we get from the seemingly impossible to the possible? For 61 years now since our independence as a sovereign nation, our politicians, and specifically our people, have miserably failed to adopt social change. Politics today now seems to be the economic indicator of our business.
In our country, the downward swing of the real estate cycle preceded that of the general business recession. The lag that went beyond the period of general business recovery is tied with the political cycle.
For those who enter the real estate market, it is easy to determine the social and economic side of the cycle. But the political forces that affect real estate as a commodity and the legal requirements — which govern the transfer of real estate, its use (which require government approval) and the essential and basic prerequisite of such — have become a nightmare to investors in some cities and towns where graft and corruption is rampant.
As a resource and commodity, real estate affects the welfare of all. It is continually being bought, sold, improved, financed, leased, managed, appraised, and otherwise dealt in by related businesses and profession.
As an investment, real estate requires large capital outlays. That is why it is a favorite source of graft and corruption where businessmen and investors have no choice but to allocate a budget for such transaction. The most respectable and honest government office dealing in real estate is the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board.
The large expenditures required to put real estate into productive use calls for elected local officials and government employees to practice good governance in the issuance of licenses and permits. It is the bureaucratic bottleneck that needs to be addressed urgently.
However, investors and business people are equally guilty of the cause of graft and corruption in government.
