Competitiveness

Mario Taguiwalo, philo-sopher-in-residence of the Pagbabago@Pilipinas, quotes an unnamed American statesman in distinguishing between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives believe that culture will shape a nation’s destiny. Liberals believe that adept political leadership is essential in saving a culture from itself.

That differentiation was used to preface Mario’s discourse on the mode of electoral engagement the Pagbabago network could involve itself in this election season. We did not settle the question on whether we are conservatives or liberals in the American sense of those terms.

We do understand that both our culture and our politics are in dire need of transformation. We do suspect that our damaged culture and our even more severely damaged politics could doom our nation.

We are sure we need to act in a manner concerned citizens and devout patriots ought to. But while we have begun organizing a bloc of young and progressive local politicians on a program of national transformation, we are not a political party. Nor are we an NGO, although as a network we have participated in civil society alliances.

We even hesitate to call ourselves an organization. Composed of accomplished, independent and diverse personalities, we have settled on describing Pagbabago as an "organization of individuals with their respective spheres of influence." We work intensely on projects we agree on, such as the first ever tri-media forum Media Nation that begins today at Clark Field.

Media Nation is a conference without an agenda. It will involve some of the best and brightest media personalities in print and broadcast, coming together to freely discuss the role of their profession in building not only and informed but a discerning people.

This conference will be very much like the usual Pagbabago plenary sessions that are convened quite regularly: it will be basically an open-ended conversation organized on the possibility that common action could be taken.

Separately, a team within Pagbabago is currently drafting a set of defining policy questions that the network will pose to the presidential candidates. There will be no preferred or correct answers to these questions. They are intended to force the candidates to commit clearly to whichever side of the policy questions they prefer – and provide voters an idea of what is on the mind of the people who want to lead us.

These are questions that will be posed publicly and answered in the same public manner. They are questions that will be massively disseminated to the electorate and the positions of the candidates publicized as widely as possible. We will seek the help of our friends in the advertising industry and in the mass media to ensure this.

Should it be possible, we will meet with the candidates either individually or collectively to discuss these questions and their responses to them.

Pagbabago, at this point, is not prepared to – as a network – endorse any of the candidates.

We have more or less agreed to address ourselves to constituencies which will persist whoever wins in May. We want to encourage the candidates to address those con

We are more interested in the quality of public debate that will characterize this election. We hate to see the democracy we all fought so hard to win degenerate into an electoral process won or lost on the basis of populist demagoguery or by means of song-and dance routines.

Pagbabago held a plenary discussion last Tuesday. We reviewed the initial draft of the questions we will pose the candidates. They dealt with the obvious policy issues at stake in the forthcoming elections. We had a lively debate over how some of the questions were framed, whether they could be answered in a level of generality that there will seem to be no disagreement among all the candidates, and whether they were leading in one way or the other reflecting our own prejudices.

In the course of the debate, Doris Ho came out strongly for including in the key questions a demand for the candidates to elaborate on a competition policy.

Doris made a good point about the electoral debate tending to emphasize the points of disagreement between us – but the reality is that the "enemy" are our competitors in the global market. Whoever wins this election must lead the nation in competing internationally. We will fall or rise on the basis of our ability to compete.

Boy, do we need a competition policy.

The Philippine position in the global scheme of things has deteriorated quite alarmingly of late – and in large part because of the uncertainties created by the no-brainer manner we conduct our electoral politics.

Moody’s has just downgraded our credit rating. That downgrade will discourage investments and raise interest margins for our sovereign debt papers as well as private borrowing.

The Philippine peso and the Thai baht used to be nearly at par value before the Asian financial crisis broke out in 1997. Now the baht as strengthened to about 39 to a dollar while the peso weakened to nearly 56 to the dollar.

The entire region, including Japan’s ancient economy, is recovering strongly from the setbacks of the financial crisis. The Philippines is lagging behind nearly everybody else in this dynamic region.

While everybody else is busy realigning its policies to be more competitive in the changed environment of post-crisis East Asia, the Asian Development Bank is calling our attention to the need to move with a little more urgency on the outstanding items of economic policy reform. No thanks to our do-nothing Congress, most of the reform measures remain on the shelf. The Senate, in particular, has the worst work record ever given this chambers recent vulnerability to partisan grandstanding.

The incompetence of our electoral authorities, the opportunism of our politicians, the general senselessness with which we play our electoral games, and the unwarranted noise generated by fanatical partisanship are pushing the nation to the brink. There is a sense of impending chaos precipitated by an election in disarray.

Elections in this country are more than the national pastime they have been described to be. Elections are a national passion.

And each day we waste, engrossed with the antics of the great artists of politicking, the gap in competitiveness with our neighbors widens. Our ability to take the strategic steps required to flourish in a competitive and increasingly borderless global economy is diminished.

No wonder those calling for the military to step in and postpone this orgy of politicking feel so strongly that our political culture has become a serious hazard to our nation’s wellbeing.