Lost

This day 28 years ago, our people stood high on the heap. On the ruins of a fallen dictatorship, we looked forward to a kinder future, a community that lifted the least amongst us, a new generation standing its ground in a competitive world.

We would no longer be the Sick Man of Asia. We thought we would stand a proud beacon for the possibility of prosperity in freedom.

Nearly three decades after a hopeful upheaval, we wonder if we had not lost the way.

Today, more Filipinos are mired in poverty than ever before. Ten million Filipinos need to work elsewhere to earn a living. Unemployment is at its highest. The economy is most dependent on remittances as ever.

Our natural resources are exhausted. Over the past three decades, we have dumped more of our population on other economies than during the preceding century.

We might not have slid back to our former role as the Sick Man of Asia with our rather respectable, albeit remittance-fueled and therefore consumption-led, GDP growth rate. However, we receive only a pittance of the investment flows into our dynamic region. We are nowhere near approximating the investment-led growth pattern of our neighbors.

This is the reason our investment-driven neighbors are bringing down their unemployment and poverty rates, building a more sustainable basis for future growth. In the last three decades, China pulled over 600 million out of poverty. Indonesia nearly halved its poverty rate. Thailand built a robust agricultural sector. Vietnam is quickly catching up with the core ASEAN economies.

To say we wasted opportunities is to make an understatement. We squandered opportunities like it was going out of style.

Today, we are grappling with looming power shortages. Having failed to bring down the costs of electricity, we could not attract industrial investments. Without those investments, we cannot create quality jobs.

The infrastructure gap continues to yawn. With inferior infra, our costs for producing anything become uncompetitive. That is an invitation for smuggling, which has become the fastest growing section of our economy.  Our archipelagic economy remains disarticulated, with many island economies cut off from the mainstream by the cost of transport.

The new global economy is talent-intensive. Economies thrive or retreat on the basis of the skills profile of their population. After nearly three decades, we have not made the investments necessary to build a competitive labor force. By contrast, South Korea invested in its present talent-intensive generation that exports everything from information technology to popular culture.

While all our neighbors operate on plans with 30-year horizons, we continue to plod on with puny six-year development plans. Each incoming administration resets everything, content to blame failure on predecessors. There is barely any continuity in planning and execution.

I have yet to cull the numbers, but there is reason to suspect our cost of maintaining government is unreasonably high — therefore diverting resources from long-term economic investments. One provincial governor recently estimated it costs P1,350 to deliver P1 of government service to the grassroots. That is completely insane.

When Corazon Aquino assumed power in 1986, she promised to trim the large bureaucracy inherited from dictatorship. When she left office, the public payroll was twice as long. Devolution has since continued to inflate the size of government. Federalism will double the size of our bureaucracy.

Why did we stray so far away from the goals we set for ourselves after a triumphant uprising?

There are too many reasons to fit the limited space we have here. The single biggest reason, I submit, is the distorted politics we cultivated after dictatorship’s downfall.

The first misstep is likely the decision to return to the presidential form of government shortly after the uprising. It is a form of government that failed us before, but we refuse to learn.

The decision to return to the presidential form was dictated by short-term considerations. Enough people thought Cory should be properly installed as president to keep the new regime from dissembling and curtail political instability. The new regime, true enough, did not dissemble but instability continued.

A return to the presidential form meant a return to the old manner of conducting politics. The provincial political lords returned to power and the old oligarchy recovered its grip over national policy-making.

While politics as usual recovered quite quickly, the presidential form was not conducive to strengthening of party politics. A parliamentary format might have been more conducive to party formation and the inclusion of the many political and ideological strands that were involved in the uprising.

By returning to the presidential form, after an authoritarian interregnum that saw the extinction of mass-based political participation, a politics of exclusion commenced. The traditional elite consolidated their hold on power.

Without political party development, elections became contests of popularity rather than a forum for articulating visions. Representation became based on patronage rather than shared values. Celebrity-driven and patronage fueled politics overrun principled alliance. We corrupted the democratic form.

This corrupted democratic form could not rally public support for large ideals. It eventually descended into the politics of hate and demonization. This is not the sort of politics that would enable the state to lead development.

The corrupted democracy we began building in 1986 has now blossomed into its final, most tragic form. Political parties supply the system with leaders and visions. Without them, our politics will be without vision and effective leadership.