‘Pagod’

by Emmanuel Doy Santos

Who would have thought that 36 years after the EDSA ‘People Power’ revolt of 1986, we would face another election where the leading candidates include one Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. and a widow, turned politician aligned with the Aquinos?

Having lived through Martial Law, I cannot really fathom what is unfolding. Within what I thought was my own circle of tight knit friends, bonds that have lasted decades have snapped. People have left our group because they can’t stand the rhetoric of some of its members. Friends whom I had never known to be political are now quite vocal about their views and judging those who don’t share them.

I’ve never really seen such partisanship before. People are taking their politics in such a deeply personal manner, the way they treat religion. I mean, if anyone should take it that way it ought to be me. My late father Emmanuel Tiu Santos was a bona fide EDSA figure.

Having campaigned for Ferdinand Sr in 1961 and gotten Imelda as a sponsor at his wedding in 1967, he turned when Marcos declared Martial Law in 1972. Having sponsored the bill of political, social and economic rights in the Con-Con, as well as the provisions setting up the Ombudsman, he realized that he needed to take a stand.

He decided to throw his hat in the ring in 1978. He co-founded the political party Lakas ng Bayan (LABAN) and ran with Ninoy Aquino. They contested seats for the national capital region in the Interim Batasan Pambansa elections and faced off with his ninang Imelda and her KBL slate.

My father together with his crew helped engineer the noise barrage that swept the capital prior to election day. He and many others considered this to be the first battle cry of EDSA (see ‘Laban ’78 to EDSA ’86', Inquirer, April 23, 2016).

I personally visited Ninoy in Times Street when he was under house arrest. Our family went to Boston in the summer of 1981 and spent three days with Ninoy and Tita Cory going around Harvard, Bunker Hill and other local sites.

After EDSA, dad literally dodged bullets and a grenade that was hurled at him while delivering a speech at his ‘miting de avance’ on the eve of the elections of 1988. He stood for election having been the appointed governor of his home province Nueva Ecija. This was an election that locals to this day maintain was stolen from him.

If anyone should hold strong views about a potential return of the Marcoses and their cronies to power, it ought to be people like me. But somehow, I’m not as affected, as some of my friends, who growing up, never really spoke of politics.

I do know that the outcome of this election does matter. When I see Marcos Jr polling ahead, it does affect me. I sleep uneasily at night and wake-up the following morning worrying for my country. But one thing I cannot bring myself to do is criticize nor condemn my friends who are Marcos loyalists.

The reason for that is simple. I recognize that the Marcoses were a product of their time and the internal contradictions of Philippine society that began at its founding when the Spanish friar lands fell into the hands of a few. As Iyer and Maurer (2009) pointed out, wealth became even more concentrated after the American colonial government partitioned and distributed these lands between 1903 and 1918.

“The ‘landed elite’ appears to have been broadened at the expense of smallholding families,” they wrote. This gave rise to the Old Society, where in the words of Ninoy “the few enjoy the fat of the land, and the many suffer.”

I’ve come to recognize a truism (and I mean no disrespect to those aggrieved by the late dictator). Yes, thousands were confirmed to have been abducted, summarily executed, mutilated, raped and tortured during that dreadful period under Marcos Sr. But this horrendous and horrific suffering is itself dwarfed by the tens of thousands that die in our country every year due to lack of basic human and health services, malnutrition, and natural disasters.

Yes, billions were siphoned off by the Marcoses to overseas bank accounts, and only a fraction was returned. But that too is a fraction of the billions wasted and stolen by corrupt officials today. How can we be so intolerant of one kind of abuse, yet turn a blind eye to the other?

The Marcoses, as dreadful as they are, as shameless as they are, are not the real problem. They are merely a symptom of the problem. The fact that their political fortunes have reversed, points to the failings of the post-EDSA neoliberal state that replaced them. The reason why I can’t engage in this gratuitous display of faux revulsion at the Marcoses, is that both sides are equally to blame for the perpetuation of our people’s suffering.

After all these years of political squabbles, I’ve grown weary of the circus that goes on at elections, while the fundamental basic needs of our people remain overlooked. For once, I’d like for us to take their problem seriously. Stop pretending that it will go away, the moment we vanquish the other side. No, it won’t go away. It hasn’t.

It is clear that what we need to do is see through the illusion of a dualist world view where the competing narratives of either side battle it out, and deal with the reality of ordinary people's lives where the true battle for survival persists. The best way to prevent a repeat of the past is not to promote a confected golden age by one side or the other, but to step out of the cycle of reactivity and retribution, to end the cycle of poverty, and attend to the fierce urgency of now.

The author is a development economist completing his doctoral studies in policy innovation at the University of New England in Australia. He supports Isko Moreno for president.

Dilawan: Rise and Fall of the EDSA Regime - Vision vs Reality

In this episode we are going to dissect the vision that Ninoy had offered for the Philippines, and delve more  deeply into the early days of the post-EDSA regime to see how this vision was corrupted by the yellow forces.

Episode 17: Otso Diretso, MaBaGoKoTo, Hugpong, atbp.

The countdown to election day begins.

We are now about 30 days away from the 2019 midterms. In this episode we’ll be looking at the senate race, and how that has been unfolding. We compare the competing candidates' platforms, namely Otso Diretso's campaign platform and PDP-Laban's.

When you put the two parties’ positions side-by-side there is a clear contrast between them, both in terms of their overarching philosophies and approach to governance and development. Those who say that this election isn’t about ideas are wrong. There are clear battle lines here, and they are not just personality-driven.

Get the transcripts of the show from here.

Erratum: in counting the number of senators that became VP, I mistakenly included Mar Roxas in the list.

Episode 12: The question of Philippine federalism, Part 2

Some critics of this push for federalism have questioned why? Why empower local elites, who might run their regional governments like personal fiefdoms? Greater fiscal autonomy will just bloat the bureaucracy and provide greater opportunities for corruption.

Since political dynasties resurfaced after EDSA ‘86 and still dominate the current political landscape, how do we convince these powerful elites to legislate something that might harm their own interests? What’s in it for them to begin with, in other words?

In this episode we look at the proposals for political and electoral reforms, proposed by the Federal Institute Study Group, which would allow the Philippines to gain the full benefit of localization through federalism.

Get the show notes to this podcast here.

Episode 6: Can Duterte avoid the pitfalls of Marcos? Part 2

If Pres. Duterte wants to succeed where Pres. Marcos failed, he will need to avoid certain pitfalls. This series examines what they were and seeks to determine how Duterte can avoid them. This is the second of three parts.

The article of Tim Kelsall quoted in this podcast is found here.

Corrupt Yet So Popular

It is quite surprising a phenomenon to witness how that in many countries around the world corrupt leaders often retain public support.

In a recent poll conducted in the Philippines, the late fromer president Corazon Aquino was rated highest by her countrymen among their most loved political leaders (no surprise there), but the man she toppled in a bloodless revolution, Ferdinand Marcos ranked second.

Following in fourth place was the actor turned politician former president Joseph Estrada who was ousted and convicted for his involvement in illegal racketeering. The latter two figured in the top ten most corrupt leaders of the world compiled by the corruption watchdog Transparency International.

The man who topped that list, Mr Suharto, the late former dictator of Indonesia is still widely held in good esteem by his countrymen despite what current media reports suggest about the successful drive against corruption there. What makes these crooked leaders so well-loved among their poor countrymen long after their demise? Is it their charisma? Perhaps. Is it a sense of nostalgia? For what? Is there something that these corrupt leaders attend to quite effectively that honest leaders fail to do?

The answer to that last question is most definitely a yes. What they do is support a system of clientelism to enough of their constituents so that in their eyes, the means through which such patronage is dispensed becomes irrelevant in a country where governments fail to provide an adequate level of support to their populace.

The phenomenon is in no way limited to developing countries. In an advanced economy such as Italy where people still prefer to contract with each other based on personal ties rather than through impersonal markets, their current prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who has been hit by sex and corruption scandals, seems to retain wide popular support.

It took the global recession for the long-dominant ruling party of Japan to be booted out in last year's election. The new government vowed to take down the all-powerful triad led by the civil service along with members of the political and business elite who in the past have so successfully colluded to steer the economy in the right direction, but whose complacency was now holding the country back, so it claimed.

Even in countries where impersonal contracting has taken over as a result of a strong judicial system and where governments are adequately resourced, political parties are often found to engage in unsavoury practices. In Illinois for instance, the former governor tried to sell the vacated senate seat of President Barack Obama. One can find instances of such wheeling and dealing in local politics perhaps where such personalistic contracting can still be performed.

A recent Gallup poll in the US found trust in government to be at a low. Ever since the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal that toppled President Nixon, the trust rating has gone down from the previous highs registered since the “New Deal” era of President Franklin Roosevelt.

Many attribute this low rating to the gridlock and extreme partisanship that goes on in Washington. Yet despite these sentiments, polarising and highly partisan figures such as former Alaskan governor and vice presidential contender Sarah Palin retain immense popularity. This is probably due to the fact that they are able to connect with their party base by delivering the “red meat” in terms of policy prescriptions.

In other words, in Western democracies, instances of patron-client relations involving the exchange of tangible goods can still be found within governments and political parties, but it is replaced by and large with principle-based policy back-scratching that appeals to the lowest common denominator among their most loyal constituents.

The Romanticism of Elections

As the election season officially commenced in the Philippines this week, it has become quite fashionable among prominent local commentators to romanticise the current Philippine presidential race of 2010 painting it in the epic proportions of a contest between the forces of good and evil. An example of this is a recent column by Mr Manolo Quezon, a former speechwriter for Pres Gloria Arroyo in which he traces the political genealogy of all presidential contenders to the traditions belonging to one of two leading protagonsists in the 1986 people power uprising, former presidents Ferdinand Marcos and Corazon Aquino.

It becomes apparent that Mr Quezon regards only one candidate, Benigno Aquino III, the only son of Corazon, worthy of claiming the mantle of democracy represented by his late great mother. All others it would seem belong to “the wrong side of history” as Pres Marcos had been in 1986. A win by any of these candidates would be “impermissible” from Mr Quezon’s perspective. The dark and ominous undertones of such a statement are evident. Either election officials conclude with an outcome consistent with History (with a capital H), or the forces under the Aquino banner might or should enforce their own will on the situation and produce the right outcome from their perspective.

I don't think it is accurate to paint this race using such a broad brush. It would be an oversimplification of what the candidates, Mr Aquino and everyone else, truly represent. I don't think for instance it is fair to associate any one candidate with the repressive authoritarian regime of Mr Marcos for instance. Not one of them is espousing a return to dictatorial rule, but anyone including Mr Aquino could be capable given the right circumstances of taking the country down a path of greater repression of civil liberties and weakening of property rights as the embattled rule of Mrs Arroyo so aptly demonstrated through her flirtations with emergency powers.

A more balanced approach would produce a nuanced view of the two leading contenders, Messrs Aquino and Manuel Villar, a self-made Fortune 500 tycoon with a rags-to-riches story. It would show the evolution of two previously flawed attempts at addressing the problem of underdevelopment in the Philippines which they, on the face of it, represent and hope to redeem.

One strand, implicitly espoused by Mr Villar, has sought to deal with the rent-seeking nature of a weak state by centralising rule-making with the chief executive and by so doing reduce the potential for petty corruption elsewhere. This is a situation which makes the office he would occupy prone to intensive lobbying, but by the same token, present an improvement on the current situation of chaotic decentralised plunder. With a more disciplined bureaucracy and a coherent strategy, rapid development as illustrated by the East Asian economies becomes possible.

This assumes of course that the chief executive himself is disciplined and capable of resisting intense pressure to collude with powerful interest groups. But even if he succumbs to such pressure, the founder of the Corruption Perception Index (transparency.org) Johann Lambsdorff has found that investors actually prefer grand corruption over petty corruption (!) presumably because of the greater predictability that the former affords.

The problem though with this strand is that in some cases corruption does serve a purpose in enabling productive sectors of society to overcome stifling regulatory hurdles in the pursuit of greater value and output within the economy. By centralising rule-making, the executive also centralises deal-making, which means that only a select group of associates and hangers-on can take advantage of the unique opportunities that abound under a crafty and entrepreneurial president as demonstrated by the past administrations of Messrs Marcos and Joseph Estrada (ousted and convicted for plunder but later pardoned by Mrs Arroyo and now placed third by many pollsters in the race to succeed her).

This lessens the amount of investments made by other players due to fears of expropriation by those closely linked with the administration, a point that is exemplified by a scandal involving Mr Villar’s commercial property ventures and two nearly identical road projects. One was publicly funded, thanks to Mr Villar’s intervention as the head of a powerful Senate finance committee, the other privately financed under a fee for use basis. The private venture eventually backed down due to competition from Mr Villar's free access road that conveniently wound through his commercial neighborhood projects.

The other strand promoted by Mr Aquino seeks to maintain the current system of decentralised rule-making and with it the petty corruption that prevails, but what it seeks to introduce is greater transparency and participation in the system. By all accounts, this is arguably the only legitimate means of prying the state loose from the clutches of special interest groups.

The challenge of course is achieving this goal with the meager resources that a third world nation can ill afford to waste given the multitude of development programs it needs to fund. If even the well resourced governments of advanced economies find it troublesome if not costly to enforce such institutions. (An eminent economist in the field, Douglas North, puts the price tag at 35-40% of GDP. What hope is there then for a cash-strapped government that can only raise a mere 14-7% at best?)

Ironically, pursuing “good government” through a costly enforcement system might in the long-run lead to greater corruption. This is a view endorsed by some leading institutional economists. And in the Philippines, it could be argued, the confiscation and sale of assets acquired illegitimately by public officials that begun under Mrs Aquino has itself become a source of corruption.

So in the end what we are left with are permutations of previously failed or flawed experiments espoused by members of the ruling elite in the hope of vindicating the competing hypotheses adopted by their predecessors in addressing the underdevelopment problem of the country. It is not that one candidate is on the right side of history and the other is not. What each party is seeking at this point is a way to carve out a place in history that would suit their own personal narratives.

Aquino on Countering the Calculus of Corruption

At the press conference following his announced bid for the presidency in 2010, Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III revealed what could be a guiding principle in his approach to good governance.

(Right: Senator Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III announced back in September his intention to seek the presidency of the Philippines in the election of May 2010.)

When asked about his solution to widespread corruption, he said firstly that he would emulate his mother, former President Corazon Aquino, whose reputation for simple living engendered greater honesty among public servants. Secondly, beyond appeals to a concern for the greater good, he would vigorously uphold an enforcement of the rules which would not only entail swift justice in prosecuting those who break the code, but incentives to those who abide by it. He called this his “carrot and stick” approach.

The test of this hypothesis will come no less from his office should he be elected which now seems very likely given his astronomic lead in the polls. In the past, winning and occupying the highest post in the land has been subject to what economists call an “incentive incompatible” problem, namely, a misalignment of incentives that ensured a reneging on the promise to uphold and defend the constitution and the laws of the land.

Given weaknesses in institutions, it has been all too easy to “take” rather than “make” while in office. The so-called checks on the excesses have been ineffective under the structure of rent-seeking incentives at play.

But now Filipinos could be witnessing the birth of public stewardship motivated by a true sense of noblesse oblige. Self-restraint might be the only effective means to check executive greed. In the past every contender and pretender to higher office has feigned a sense of noble intentions. The purifying trials of the Aquino family under the repressive Marcos regime may provide the most authentic case of altruism at work.

Turning their backs on the honest democratic legacy of their parents would prove too costly for the Aquino children because it would mean nullifying the sacrifices made by their parents all throughout their formative years.

The late Senator Benigno Aquino Jr set off a virtuous cycle of willling self-sacrifice that was “gifted” to the Filipino people. They reciprocated first by expressing public grief and outrage over his assassination, and then by endowing the presidency to his wife, Corazon, who in turn renewed the cycle of giving back by restoring democratic freedoms curtailed under the dictatorial regime of her predecessor.

(Right: The assassination of former Senator Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino, Jr on 21 August 1983 shortly after being escorted by airport security off his plane at the Manila International Airport triggered widespread public outrage against the Marcos regime.)

Now it seems the people in honour of her own personal sacrifice following her untimely demise due to colon cancer are about to reciprocate the Aquinos once over by entrusting the presidency to the only son of the family, Benigno III.

This politics of exchange is not the debased form of transactional politics that is common among the ruling elites and their constituents, a practice that has left the Philippines languishing at the bottom of Transparency International's corruption league table for the Asia Pacific.

Rather, the calculus of exchange that seems to have been initiated by the Aquinos follows the pattern of “gift-giving” in close-knit cultures where the commodities exchanged cannot be valued and where renewing ties by re-investing in social capital is the key.

This new and ongoing dynamic that has sparked a sense of altruistic behaviour among those engaged in the "political game” is set to counter the vicious cycle of corruption and rent-seeking that has been entrenched in the governance arrangements of political institutions operating at the moment.

Hu is afraid of the big bad state police?

In the World Bank’s annual Doing Business Survey, the People’s Republic of China is regularly ranked in the middle of table. For 2009, it was ranked 83rd overall out of 181 countries in terms of the ease of doing business. It is immediately preceded by Trinidad and Tobago, Panama and Kenya, and ranked right below it are Grenada, Belarus and Albania.

The rest of the so called BRIC economies do not fair any better with the Russian Federation at 120th, India at 122nd, and Brazil at 125th place. The rankings in the survey are determined by a set of criteria including the ease of starting a business, getting construction permits, ease of hiring, enforcing contracts, protecting investors, securing credit, paying taxes, trading across borders and the ease of closing down a business.

In economic studies, these rankings are often used as “proxy” indicators for institutional quality. Dani Rodrik has for years controversially raised the point that the rapid growth of countries like China provides evidence that poor institutional quality aka corruption is not necessarily a roadblock to development.

Enter Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu. What impact, if any, will his being incarcerrated for allegedly bribing officials and in the process stealing “state secrets” have for the future of doing business in China?