Again I ask: is it hopeless?

P-Noy said he has lost his patience on corruption. On the surface, that is the best news in his almost two-hour long SONA. But I can almost imagine the “kapalmuks” in Customs, Immigration and elsewhere in the bureaucracy alluded to by P-Noy are just smirking and giving him the finger.

Even the seemingly fearless Gen. Danny Lim is cowering in fear of the “powerful forces intervening at BOC.” Because Gen. Lim does not have the courage to name the politicians who intervened in Customs operations, anything they do now at Customs they call reforms will seem to be nothing more than showbiz PR moves.

If only it is true that P-Noy has lost his patience not just on corruption but on the slow delivery of services and infrastructure, that would be the best news for this country in three years. But as I pointed out last Friday, it also seems P-Noy bought the BS and the excuses for the continuing failure of his team to deliver anything tangible and visible for our people.

One cabinet member, a source told me, commented that I was starting to get shrill. Ironically, this same cabinet member had often complained about the slow delivery of infrastructure that he needs to deliver on his targets. Since I know he is not afraid to lose his job, I am surprised he is not publicly shrill himself by now.

While waiting for the SONA to start, ANC aired a well written documentary on the challenges our national leader faces. What caught my attention was a quotation attributed to NEDA Chief Arsi Balisacan which I thought should be taken as a call to arms to speed up delivery of infrastructure.

Arsi said that even if we increased our infrastructure investment from two percent of GDP to five percent of GDP, we will still be 10 years behind Thailand. That’s easy to understand… Thailand had been investing so much on infrastructure for at least two decades now.

That, my friends, is why I am starting to get shrill. Some people may take Arsi’s observation as reason to abandon ship because it is hopeless. We cannot catch up with the likes of Thailand any time soon and by 2015, we will be flooded with Thai products they can produce cheaper and probably better.

Or P-Noy can take that massive infrastructure gap as a challenge he must meet. Of course we can continue our relaxed muddling through way of doing things but that means we will just fall further and further behind.

In a sense, everything starts with the President. If he shows leadership, things will move. If he buys the BS his cabinet members feed him to excuse their failure, the nation is screwed.

That is why P-Noy’s SONA disappoints. It regales us with useless details and a lot of sarcasm but fails to give us the big picture. As Gerry Sicat observed in the pages of this business section, P-Noy only gave “a discussion of problems and details that I would expect from my town mayor, but not from my president.”

Reflecting on Arsi’s observation, I couldn’t help getting extremely mad at our past leaderships for having allowed our nation’s economy to fall behind that much. And the present one isn’t doing much better.

There is no excuse not to at least start doing the right things. We have enough experts who have catalogued all the things we have done wrong as well as what to do to fix things up. For one thing, I know Arsi knows what ought to be done. P-Noy should listen to him.

In a word, it is competitiveness we have to focus on. We are talking here regional and global competitiveness. Yet, there was no hint in P-Noy’s SONA that suggested he was even conscious of how vitally important it is for us to get competitive if we are to reduce poverty in our midst.

Achieving competitiveness must be seen by the President in the context of a war. We need a grand plan on how this war will be waged. There must be a sense of urgency among his key cabinet members because defeat or failure is not an option.

What we have instead is a token response to this need through the National Competitiveness Council, a joint government and private sector body. I doubt if P-Noy even knows who comprise the council, much less have taken time to listen to their plans and programs.

To the credit of the NCC members, they are quietly working in the sidelines and doing what they can to improve our competitiveness as measured by various international bodies. Their report card shows we have much to improve on, even as some significant gains have been achieved in some areas.

 The biggest disappointment for me last Monday was P-Noy’s failure to say anything about competitiveness specially in the light of 2015 when the ASEAN becomes a single economic market. Of course I know we are not ready but even then, I wondered if my President at least knows how badly we will fare.

Gerry Sicat pointed out worrisome statistics on FDI. “During the Aquino period, Vietnam brought in a total of $15.8 billion which represents 3.7 times the amount that Aquino brought into the Philippines. It is interesting that during President Ramos’s time, Vietnam managed to exceed Philippine FDI inflows already. It was 1.2 times what Ramos succeeded to bring.

“Myanmar, isolated for years, has surpassed the Philippines in FDIs compared to our country under Aquino’s presidency by attracting $4,443 billion. During the time of Ramos, Myanmar hardly brought in any FDI.”

With numbers like that, P-Noy should be pushing the panic button and asking tough questions of his Trade and Industry Secretary. What worries me is that DTI Sec. Greg Domingo is more ready with explanations of why our FDI numbers are what they are than he is with a game plan to do something significant about it. He even argues that BSP is computing our FDI number wrong.

Indeed, the nonchalance of Sec. Domingo, as if our FDI numbers are nothing to worry about, is what gets me. If this is as good as we can manage, we are in trouble. Where are the industry road maps he had been talking about for a long time now?

If we viewed competitiveness as we would view a war we must win, we need generals who have a vision and a plan of how to win the battles. If the President is aware of just how important competitiveness is, he would be moving by now, late as it is, to address the challenge.

Come 2015, it is no longer possible to establish a moat of old fashioned protectionism without losing our standing in Asean and the world. Ready or not, we have to face stiff competition from our neighbors who are legally entitled to enter our market just as we are entitled to enter theirs with little or no barriers.

It is unfortunate we have this mindset of isolationism disguised as nationalism at the root of the restrictive economic provisions in our constitution. We are living in a globalized world and unless we are competitive, we are nothing.

This is why I have been shrill, essentially out of frustration. We need a sense of urgency… to fast track vital infrastructure to move products and services competitively, to adjust our laws to improve competitiveness and create jobs. Sure we have to watch out for corruption but we need to get projects done fast enough too.

I hope P-Noy understands the concept of competitiveness and has been adequately briefed on the consequences of entering the Asean single market unprepared. I won’t bet on it.

PNCC

I received this e-mail from Rudy Cuenca in reaction to last Friday’s column.

Blaming the franchise of PNCC as delaying P-Noy’s Infra projects is out of place.

CDCP, which I headed, was taken over by GFIs’ in  April 1983, (thereafter name was changed to PNCC)  based on a PD  converting

CDCP’s obligations to the GFIs into equity. The whole CDCP board and officers were replaced by GFI’s nominees headed by ROBERTO ONGPIN and PLACIDO MAPA JR.

PD 1894 was issued after the takeover. Government owns more than 70 percent of PNCC equity. They have full control and no shareholders meeting to elect officers has been called since 1983.

For 30 years PMO controlled PNCC.  Government can do (and does), what it pleases. Directors and officers are appointed by the President. So why don’t they use PNCC?

GSIS owns around 24 percent of PNCC. So why not protect that investment? They have made sure that the 20 percent  private equity has no voice.

Is P-Noy’s complaint just an  alibi?

Survey

A survey found that 50 percent of men said they’d cheat on their wife with her best friend if they were guaranteed they wouldn’t get caught.

The other 50 percent said they wish their wives had better looking friends!

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco