The real showdown

President GMA may not be Marcos, but the forces that impinge on our ability to develop as a nation in his time, remain. That is the challenge to President GMA and the countdown has begun. I am talking of the power of elite families. How President GMA will deal with this remains to be seen. In his book, An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines Alfred W. McCoy writes about how Marcos during his 20 years in power, tinkered with the composition of the elites. In the end he failed to change the underlying political and social system that put them at the top in the first place. The problem was that Marcos had his own favorite families. He failed to dismantle what McCoy calls the "nexus of formal regulation and informal privilege that had long allowed family-owned corporations to control so much of the country’s wealth.

That is still where we are today – a country with powerful elite families generally favored from the rest of aspiring entrepreneurs. "Through this particular interaction between strong families and a weak state, the Philippine economy had declined markedly compared to its neighbors in eastern Asia. In South Korea, Singapore and Thailand the state has played an active but less biased role in national development avoiding the arbitrary and ultimately destructive partisanship rampant in the Philippines," concludes McCoy.

It is hoped that through Charter change, the entry of more political players (parliamentary federal) and new money from both local and foreign investments (economic liberalization) may help level the playing field. Understandably some of these families, because of a fluke of events, do not enjoy closeness to the Arroyo government and do not want Charter change to succeed. Their aim is to make Charter change fail and come 2007 they will put up their own candidates to carry on the old system in which they flourish and dominate.

Much will depend on just how seriously President GMA takes the legacy she would like to leave behind. These families may be powerful but in the end, it will be a test of wills. For the rest of us, we can only watch haplessly as the drama unfolds. The ace card for us, ordinary Filipinos, is that President GMA is made of sterner stuff than Marcos and that she will finally come to grips with this problem. It will require exemplary heroism but she will need help not just from Palace inner circle enjoying their closeness to power but from the rest of the country. Luckily, she has the benefit of hindsight of lessons she can learn from Marcos’ failure and shortsightedness. We can only hope that she has it in her to go beyond his cosmetic reforms which in the end led to his undoing.

In that sense, these elite families are not enemies. Marcos did try to weaken, even eliminate them, but only to be replaced by his own cronies. The enemy is the political structure and the system it engenders. Its motto is simple: how to use public office for private gain. I am not saying that Charter change alone will change the political culture of our society , but it is a start. On this, the responsibility for good governance will lie as much on the shoulders of the citizenry as it is with reform-minded government officials.

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It is not surprising if a Meralco-Lopez man Christian Monsod, should be the active voice behind One Voice, a group pledged to demonize constitutional reforms. His response to remove nationality provisions on investments from the Constitution is there is no need, it has many loopholes anyway. He hints that the loopholes be used instead of plugging or changing them. Is that not strange behavior for one who was an author of the 1987 Constitution? Monsod’s prescription to distort the Constitution is dangerous. He teaches the public to search for loopholes – which could lead to wishy-washy policies. It fosters the very arbitrariness that makes investors shy away from the Philippines.

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Away from the politics of those who oppose Charter change, any move to bring about lower power costs is a boon to millions of Filipinos. Both the middle and lower classes are suffering from the high cost of electricity.

For the last few months in our own home, we have taken drastic steps to reduce our electricity bill but nothing seems to work – aircons to be used only from 8 TO 8, only one light bulb is kept open outside all night, washing and ironing only once a week, etc etc. I tell my family that if even the Queen of England, one of the richest women of the world always closes the light after her, we could do the same. Still, despite the economies, the electric bill just keeps rising. Meralco calls it ‘unbundling’ but to me and most housewives it is just a kilometric list of added costs and expenses (including taxes due from them) that has nothing to do with my use of electricity and therefore not within my power to change no matter how much we economize.

Very few will understand the wholesale electricity spot market (WESM) but if it will lower my electricity bill, by all means let us have it. As President GMA explains it this is the result of free competition in the sale of electricity from the power generators. The Philippines has one of Asia’s highest electricity costs. For August 2006, electric power rates will be reduced by an average of 52 centavos per kilowatt hour in areas served by Meralco. Power rates could go down by as much as 79 centavos per kwh over the July billing. This I will have to see.

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While this is good news we should also begin thinking not just how to reduce the cost of electricity but how not to use electricity at all. Other countries are already worrying about the future. Adam Porter writes for the London Observer that the Iraqis could have shown Americans a thing or two about how to cool houses without air-cons. Isn’t it ironic that in the land of oil, there are Middle Eastern technologies going back to ancient times such as wind-catchers and ice-cooling.

For more information, look for Adapting Building and Cities for Climate Change by Sue Roaf, professor of architecture at Oxford Brookes University. She focuses on how buildings have to change as global warming intrudes further on everyday life. Wind-catchers is an ancient ventilation and cooling system used in beleaguered Baghdad. "There temperature in summer gets up to 50C, wind-catchers provide a source of conditioned fresh air by passing it through high, narrow shafts before entering the basement," says Roaf. "They cool the internal structure of the house, the walls and floors at night by removing heat from the building and making it cooler internally during the day."

Another system, ice-cooling, was once widely used in western cities and societies. Now largely forgotten, it was first recorded as a coolant more than 4000 years ago. Where? On the plains of northern Iraq. The Ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese and South Americans all used ice to cool a wide range of items including housing. So did we in the Philippines before the age of refrigerators and freezers.

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My e-mail is [email protected]