The world is watching

SINGAPORE — The Philippines has disappeared from the radar screens of many governments. But several are sitting up and taking notice again, as we prepare for a change in national leadership after nine and a half years.

I am in this city-state together with Newsbreak editor Marites Danguilan-Vitug, where we gave a briefing on the Philippine elections at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies yesterday. ISEAS is a research center set up 42 years ago by the Singapore government. It is housed within the sprawling campus of the National University of Singapore but operates independently of NUS.

I arrived here Monday on my favorite carrier, Singapore Airlines, in a heavy downpour. As always, the progress in this tiny state, not too long ago a pirate haven, makes me green with envy. The newest addition to Singapore’s tourist attractions is the East Asian theme park of Universal Studios, which opened last March on Sentosa Island. Why didn’t Universal pick the Philippines?

The Universal playground is located beside Singapore’s first casino, which finally opened last February. Foreigners can enter the casino for free; Singaporeans must pay an entrance fee of S$100. Apart from being a revenue-raising scheme, the fee is meant to blunt criticism that the casino encourages the wrong values among Singaporeans, who are renowned for discipline and hard work.

I have visited this city-state many times and have always been impressed by that discipline, and by the strong sense of nationhood among Singaporeans.

Government officials and civilians here often caution impressionable foreigners that Singapore had a unique birth and evolution as a nation, and that its size makes it more manageable. They point out that some of their experiments in social engineering have failed. State control also tends to stifle individual creativity. Yesterday a Singaporean told me that several of their key state policies, including some governing labor, have also been reversed.

But those reversals have been more in response to a changing society, making their system, if not the individual, dynamic.

Dynamism has been missing in our society for some time. Will the elections bring change?

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In Manila, foreign diplomats have been asking me about the presidential candidates, about rumors and scenarios. A common question is: Will the elections push through?

My usual response is that if you postpone general elections in the Philippines, you invite a revolution — one that will be bigger and more widespread than the two people power revolts that we’ve had. For every immoderately greedy sitting public official who wants to cling to power, there are at least two hoping to take over. At least one of those two is probably just as immoderately greedy, or even more so, than the incumbent, but no candidate is going to take a cancellation of the elections peacefully.

As of March 5, there were 50,262 candidates vying for 17,999 seats, from president down to municipal councilor, according to records of the Commission on Elections (Comelec). Unless they are seeking re-election, those candidates and their supporters are expecting change come noon of June 30, 2010.

Foreigners who have closely followed events in the Philippines for decades wonder how meaningful those changes will be, or whether a new set of crooks will simply take over the old one, with no change in the way we do business.

Judging from our chats at the end of our briefing here yesterday, I don’t think investment consultants in the audience are prepared to advise their clients to rush to the Philippines after the elections.

The attitude is wait-and-see; the next president must first prove himself. Investor confidence has been eroded so much in the past decade that whoever wins must exert additional — and sustained — effort to win back that confidence.

Investors know only too well that policies (and judicial rulings!) affecting their businesses could be reversed from one administration to the next, and even from one Cabinet secretary to a new one.

To lure job-generating investments, the next president will have to work doubly hard to show that there is a level playing field, that he has no cronies enjoying undue advantage in business.

Those crony ties are reinforced during the campaign, when the country’s top businessmen provide moral, financial and other logistical support to their chosen presidential candidate. 

Meaningful change should start with the conduct of the campaign. But so far the campaign for the presidency has descended into the gutter. And no candidate has been willing to come clean on expenditures, much less identify campaign donors. Some presidential candidates interviewed by The STAR have refused to even identify their advisers, ostensibly for fear of reprisal from the administration.

A test of change is the conduct of the elections. We are jumping from our notoriously slow manual voting and counting, which used to take more than a month, to fully automated voting and tallying. But the news from the Comelec, its Bids and Awards and Committee, and Smartmatic-TIM has not been encouraging.

Democracy is a messy system, but it shouldn’t be this messy. We give democracy a bad name. When developing countries look for models for national progress, they are unlikely to pick democratic, chaotic Philippines, but disciplined Singapore, or far-from-democratic but increasingly prosperous and globally influential China.

Indonesia, rocked by bloody rioting and runaway inflation only a few years ago, is now pulling away from us. The Indonesians have shown that despite social and political unrest, they are capable of holding credible elections — and picking the right leader.

If we bungle the elections next month, those who have written off the Philippines as Asia’s basket case will sniff, “We knew it,” turn their backs on the country and never look back.

If we make the wrong choices on May 10, the rich in our country will simply get richer in the next six years, and the poor will get poorer — or leave the country and work as maids in Singapore.