Why we can't catch our Asian neighbors?

If there is any question that lingers in the minds of many Filipinos today, it is “What’s really wrong with us and why are we always behind our Asian neighbors despite all our earnest efforts?” Last Wednesday, I woke up in the middle of the night, bothered by something… and this question suddenly appeared, as if my guardian Angel woke me up or something. Hence, I opened my laptop and began to write my thoughts on this question.

No doubt, we Filipinos have already analyzed ourselves to the death about our problems and I’m very positive the solution lies in the minds of many and it is only a matter of time when all our thoughts would unite in some kind of dramatic event that would someday force us to fix whatever is wrong with us as a people and as a country. While there are many reasons for our failure to bring ourselves up to speed with the development of our neighbors, there is one word that the Filipino nation must decide whether it’s good for us or not… whether it has helped or stagnated our country? That word is…. politics! I dare say our kind of politics is a stagnating politics.

Yes, what we have here is politics, politics and too much nauseating politics! Allow me to paraphrase the famous line by that Warden (played by Strother Martin) in the 1967 film “Cool Hand Luke” (played by Paul Newman) when he said in a deep Southern twang, “What we got here is (a) failure to communicate.” Indeed, we failed to communicate to the masa who is responsible for the election of our national or local leaders that the kind of politics we have in this country has not helped in our development, simply because our kind of politics is self-serving, ego tripping and worse of all, it is corruptive! I don’t have to explain to you about the billions that we lose annually that could have been spent to educate the poor.

A little over a month ago, I was in Shanghai with a couple of friends and one place we went was the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center just across the Shanghai museum. I was totally amazed at this edifice as it showed the growth and development of Shanghai. I was in Shanghai 21 years ago, after all, Shanghai was already dubbed as “The Paris of the East” during the 1930s and already considered one of the great cities of the world.

But what I found remarkable was the growth of Shanghai in the last 20 years depicted in a photo presentation by famed Shanghai photographer Mr. Xu Xixian who took a lot of black and white photos in the 70’s and now his son, Mr. Xu Jianrong, revisited the places where his father took those photos and this was placed on two side-by-side TV sets as a before and after scene and you can see how Shanghai grew rapidly in the last 20-years. As I pointed out, this was just around the time Cebu was hit by Super Typhoon “Ruping” you could see how much we have stagnated! Thanks to ugly politics of greed and hate, they impede our nation’s growth development!

Here’s an example of too much politics… take a look at the major cities around us, Tokyo, Bangkok, Singapore, Taipei, Hong Kong or Shanghai and compare them to Manila or Cebu for that matter and ask yourself… can you spot the difference? The difference is, there is only one Bangkok, Shanghai, Tokyo, Taipei or Hong Kong, while when you say Manila; you’re talking about Metro Manila which is Makati City, Quezon City, Pasig City, Parañaque, San Juan City and Taguig City. Metro Cebu has Mandaue, Talisay and Lapu-Lapu City.

Thanks to our highly-centralized form of government, having Metro Cities have cramped our growth and development. Why? Because of politics, each city has become a political fiefdom of the political warlords that have a stranglehold of a particular city. Hence when your next-door neighbor isn’t your friend or ally, there is no cooperation between the two cities and this stymie our growth and development.

This was magnified in Cebu during the quarrel between Cebu Governor Gwen F. Garcia and then Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña, where the latter blocked the winning bidder (a Malaysian company) to develop the “Ciudad” which would have developed a large part of the Banilad area beside the AsiaTown I.T. Park by not issuing a permit. How many jobs were lost in that political squabble, not to mention the business opportunity?

It is in the DNA of politicians to control a town or city or Province. Hence islands that were not provinces in the past have become political fiefdoms of political families. I’m talking about Biliran, Camiguin, Siquijor or even Mactan Island. So you might ask . . . How do we solve this problem?

The solution is simple. We must stop this political cancer from growing and make laws that prevent dynasties to pass on political control within the families of politicians, who ran their cities, towns or provinces as if they were family heirlooms to past from generation to generation. This is what too much politics has done to our nation, which is why 24-years after the EDSA Revolt, we’re still behind all our Asian or ASEAN neighbors.

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