Muddle along – again?

On this, the 30th day after the May 10 presidential elections, we are a nation walking on eggshells. Who will be proclaimed President on June 30? Malacañang and the majority in Congress assure us it will be the incumbent Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Not to be outdone, the opposition KNP is readying the Luneta or Makati for the presidential proclamation of Da King Fernando Poe Jr. Just in case, everything goes pfffft, not to worry. Senate President Franklin Drilon will take possession of the presidential seal and, in trumpet bold, march into Malacañang.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Philippines. Yes, more than the usual. Wow!

So what’s really in store? Who really knows? The best educated guess is that GMA will officially take over June 30 in Cebu. Who can stop her? FPJ just doesn’t have the legions to stop her. It’s she who has the legions, namely the police and the military. They are armed to the gills with a million rubber bullets, state-of-the-art riot gear, and orders to mercilessly whip the whey out of anybody or group foolish enough to stand in the way.

And yet the FPJ forces, if determined to sow chaos and anarchy, can create a lot of trouble. Bombs can explode in strategic places. Set piece street battes will be avoided. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, lightning guerrillas units can strike and create havoc. A missile or two can land in Malacañang, Congress or the Supreme Court.

This is an extreme scenario, however. And I strongly doubt it will happen. Besides, unless people by the tens of thousands back FPJ in the streets, it will fizzle out.

There’s another possibility. GMA knows full well the May 10 elections were fought in the jungles where cloak and dagger, cross and double-cross, not to mention heaps of money were the prime weapons used. It will take a long and lugubrious time before gaping wounds are healed. If the Philippines proves extremely hard to govern, she will resort to proclaiming a state of national emergency, if not outright martial rule.

But for all the elaborate precautions she took during the campaign, for all the power-point presentations of her top advisers, she failed to factor in one thing. And this is the current economic crisis. For that matter, hardly anybody anticipated the deadly spike in the prices of oil, gas, allied petroleum products. The first phase of the international energy crisis is hitting the Philippines now. And even this early, the pain is searing, hitting the poor like a long knife drawing a deep wound along the underbelly.

Transport rates are steeply rising. Everything. Power. Water. Food. Clothes, Tuition fees. School material. Electricity. Movies. Leisure. There are five million jobless. The unemployment rate is now a precarious 14 per cent. The peso can depreciate to 60 against the dollar soon.

I have long argued the Philippines over more than 50 years has grown into five monster piles of plates. These piles are now keeling over, or about to, and crashing to the floor in a thousand bits and pieces. These piles have to do with our political system, the economy, crime and violence, graft and corruption, our society as a whole. This explains events before May 30, May 30 itself, the turbulence over the counting, the turbulence after the counting.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, if proclaimed and installed, just won’t be able to cope with a nation on fire. She can talk democracy all she wants, it just won’t avail her anything.

Even if she succeeds in subjugating the FPJ forces, she has other political forces to cope with. Waiting in the shadows for the right time to move is Brother Eddie Villaneueva’s Bangon Filipinas party. He and he alone, like a modern Pied Piper, can pipe to the Luneta a million people, two million, perhaps more. Massed together, raising their fists together, defying Malacañang together, I doubt the police and military can bulldoze their ranks and send them scuttling like frightened geese.

If they try to, hundreds of demonstrators will die, most of them belonging to Brother Eddie Villanueva’s religious congregation, Jesus Is Lord (JIL). If they die because of police and military brutality, I wager this government will collapse in less than a week. If the military takes over, they too will be made short shrift of by an outraged citizenry who never liked the military in the first place.

And so?

And so I am convinced the leadership better take careful stock. The system doesn’t work anymore. And neither will muddling along The present or presumed leadership is shot full of holes. The politicians have shot their last bolt. The nation will be delighted if each and everyone of them is pitched head first into the crater of Mount Pinatubo. With the economic crisis fast devouring the edges of a suffering society, the nation can survive only if it is governed by a collegial leadership, a civilian junta if you will, supported by the military.

You heard that – collegial leadership. A junta.

This leadership can hack at the nation’s mountain pile of economic problems to the bone in record time. The bureaucracy that runs our economy today is a hundred years old, woven from Bretton Woods institutions. Sixto Roxas, one of our more brilliant economists, states that as a result, "the average long term growth rate in real GDP from 1962 to 2003 has been a miserable 3.8 per cent per annum. With a population growth of 2.4 per cent per year, the per capita GDP has grown only 1.4 per cent per year from $440 to a mere $718 (at 1985 prices and exchange rate) that has been rapidly surpassed by neighboring countries such as Thailand by four times and over."

Ting Roxas continues: "What goes into the country’s Gross Domestic Product? To begin with, 25 cents of each dollar we earn from exports of computer chips, perhaps 40 cents per dollar of garment exports, 34 centavos out of every peso of local manufactures, 79 centavos of every peso of production of palay and other basic agricultural crops, a lower 57 centavos for hogs and chickens, 66 centavos for every peso of domestic and import trade in markups and local handling costs, etc."

An economist herself, GMA must realize she is now at the broken-down bridge of an overloaded steamer just about to hit an iceberg. She just cannot pretend anymore that everything is all right. That God willing, the media willing, kindred spirits willing, she will overcome.

Overcome? GMA is dreaming.

Her problem, if she should be proclaimed, is how long she can stay the course. From Day One of her new term, thorns and thickets will hit her in the face. The government is broke. The national deficit amounts to P5.240 trillion, yoking each Filipino in the amount of P40 million. The foreign debt has gone beyond $50 billion. More than half of the national budget is automatically lopped off to service the national deficit.

GMA has to pare the bureaucracy close to the bone, get rid of fat, perhaps even resort to oil rationing, demand sacrifices from everybody to stay above the water. The present system, the present institutions just cannot do the job. They are too heavy, a hundred hammers amassed to kill a single cockroach. It will need a Lee Kuan Yew with his authoritarian whip, a Mahathir Mohamed bawling out international hedge money specialists to git and leave his country alone. Yes, in time, it will need a no-nonsense civilian junta. A revolutionary government. Just listen to economists every time they get together. Junta is what they are talking about.

Everyone remembers how Dr. Mahathir told off George Soros, hedge money genius par excellence.

If all else fails to stand up and balance, GMA can call for or summon a government of national salvation. The all-powerful Council of Leaders will include her, of course, FPJ, Brother Eddie Villanueva, and Panfilo Lacson. The Chair will rotate around a national agenda, the first three items of which would be (1) the elimination of or the crippling of poverty (2) an educational system for the poor all the way to college and university (3) the primacy of science, math and technology.

We can no longer continue as before.

Congress as we know it will have to go. And so will the judiciary, many of whose fiscals and judges today are hopelessly corrupt. The police will have to be purged. And so will the military. The May 10 election proved to be the great folly we thought it to be. The worst election in our history. But in the end, it proved to be a blessing in disguise.

The rot came out, the whole, stinking rot of a system that had seen its day, that vomited its wretched innards for all to see. The congressional canvas was the symbol of that system where only the tinkle of money mattered, where positions were up for sale, where the nation’s honor was mortgaged for seven pieces of silver.

And not once was the welfare of the poor ever mentioned.