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Saturday, February 25, 2006
After Edsa, missing links
By Juan L. Mercado
Sun.Star Cebu Columnist
“MEMORY is the mother of all wisdom,” the Greek playwright Aeschylus (525-456 BC) once said. And this week, we’ve seen an outpouring of remembrance of things past about People Power One.
My recollections are the from the “worm view” of just another martial law exile. Dictatorship compelled many to leave the country then, despite Imelda Marcos insistence: “Martial law was the most democratic period of our history.”
Edsa Week found me as a United Nations officer, lodged in the Food and Agriculture Organization’s complex, on Via delle Termie di Carcalla, in Rome.
FAO members would cluster in my fourth floor office. And we’d swap the latest on BBC, Voice of America, Rai Ono. We’d also scan through the latest clips on Manila’s gathering storm, culled from foreign news agencies.
In the last two weeks, my wife Lydia joined with other Filipinos to protest fraudulent conduct of elections. They picketed the Philippine Embassy; they’d wave posters in Pizza di San Pietro en Vaticano.
“Sir, when the SOB finally tucks tail and scrams, don’t bother coming down from the fourth floor,” said the pretty Italian-American information officer Franca Steinmann. “I will bring up the wire dispatches myself.”
Of course, when the Marcoses scrambled aboard the escape helicopters, Ms Steinmann was on leave. But her colleague, Lola Camacho of Spain was on the phone: “Sir. The jerk has finally beat it. I’m coming up with the wires.”
Fidgeting in my room was the head of the Philippine Council for Agricultural Research Council, Ramon Vallmayor. He had visited FAO and, given tense situation, he couldn’t decide whether to continue with his trip. Thrusting the wires left by Ms Camacho under his nose, I said: “Mom, you can proceed to Madrid. The bum is gone.”
There are, at any given time, over 2,000 employees of 80-plus nationalities who work in FAO’s complex. That day, Filipinos were swamped with congratulations in their offices, in the cafeteria and on the terrace with its sweeping view of Circus Maximus.
Now, 20 years later, we still cherish the end of a 14- year dictatorship. The missed opportunities for reform since People Power depress us. And Edsa’s recollections this week lead to some thoughts for this former exile.
“Tragedy is the difference between what is and what could have been”, we are told. “Is that why our national life seems a never ending cycle of “what ifs?”
What if Ferdinand Marcos’ regime didn’t deteriorate into a kleptocracy? Suppose he ignored Imelda. Imagine he used martial law powers with a Lee Kwan Yew’s austere integrity.
This country would be an economic tiger today. A grateful people would have honored him, including that elusive laurel: Libingan Ng Mga Bayani burial.
Since Marcos, average yearly GDP growth rate has been piddling That’s less than half the rates achieved by China or Thailand. So, we’re candidate for basket case status.
And what if Benigno Aquino Jr. chickened? Assume he opted for a cushy “New Society” job. Ninoy would have been diminished.
An enraged Cory Aquino would not have emerged from a housewife’s concerns. Nor would have People Power erupted, spreading to Czechoslovakia, Indonesia, and Tiannamen Square.
What if Joseph Estrada hewed to pledges, stitched in cadenced prose, into his “Now Power Is With The People” inaugural speech?
People Power 2 would not have ousted him for “5-K governance of kamag-anak, kaibigan, kumpadre, kaklase--at kabit. And Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo would have remained an indifferent Social Welfare Department secretary.
“Four things never return: the sped arrow, the spoken word, time lost and missed opportunity.” And our sorry track record speaks for openings glossed over.
“At its present rate of population growth (2.36 percent), and the economy (3 percent), it will take 30 years to catch up to where Thailand is today,” notes consultant Peter Wallace.” Yet, 25 years ago, the country was ahead of Thailand. It was second to Japan 40 years ago.”
“The Philippines missed the Industrial Revolution,” he adds. “But there is now a chance. It is in domination in the Information Age.” Can we grab chances there, given a dilapidated education system that cranks out half-literates?
What if Juan Ponce Enrile, Gringo Honasan, et al. abandoned power grab schemes and coup plots? After all, an aroused people at Edsa saved their hides from being nailed to Camp Crame’s walls by Fabian Ver’s storm troopers.
They never did. All they gave in return were seven aborted coups, “God Save The Queen” plots--and their aftermath in Oakwood and Kawal-style mutinies, plus dagdag bawas. Thus, economic growth was set back.
In dealing with the notorious martial law coconut levy, what if Eduardo Cojuangco abided by the “Zacchaeus Principle”? Would a fund-starved industry avoided being toppled by Indonesia from being Numero Ono world exporter?
In Luke’s account, the tax collector pledged four fold amends for all he had wronged. No such restitution happened here.
For over 17 years, abogados de campanilla blocked the coco levy’s return--until the Davide Supreme Court firmly ruled: the levy were taxes.
Instead of Zacchaeus-like compliance, Cojuangco’s congressional “Brat Pack” triggered a near-constitutional crisis to impeach then chief justice Hilario Davide Jr.
So, are we among what a UN Human Development Report says are “democracies in transition to nowhere”?
The Philippines was among 81 countries that, in the mid 1980s and early 1990s, shattered dictatorships, notes Deepening Democracy In A Fragmented World report.
Since then, some bogged down in limited freedoms and dysfunctional policies. The “result is increasingly alienated and angry populations.”
The missing link is “democratic governance in the broadest sense,” UNDP’s Mark Malloch Brown writes. This consists of “core values that allow the poor to gain power through participation.”
What if President Arroyo kept her Rizal Day solemn pledge not to run for reelection? Would she have been able to provide the “missing link of democratic governance”?
Instead, she’s bogged down in coddling Erap in detention, tarnished election commission nominees and surviving?
And what if citizens, like you and me, didn’t wait for “saviors” but instead buckled down to work? And what if…..Oh, never mind.
(February 25, 2006 issue)
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