Try not to venture out today to those parts of the city where dry-runs are being held for the traffic arrangements designed to move APEC delegates efficiently next week. Doing so will be hazardous to your sanity.
Lanes along traffic-prone Edsa will be closed to civilian traffic. Nearly the entire length of Roxas Boulevard will be closed. We will all get a preview of the hell the entire metropolis will endure next week.
The wisdom of holding such a high-profile meeting in a city so sorely lacking in infra has long been questioned. But that is now academic. The summit is upon us and we can only try our best to pull it off without screwing it up.
The logistical requirements for pulling this off successfully are most complex. Thousands of delegates will be shuffling about in the APEC zone. Heads of government will be secured by thousands of police and soldiers. All the major hotels in the city were farmed out to the 22 delegations.
The APEC zone will be completely sanitized. The area will be brimming with security personnel, making it look like a war zone. The nation’s premier air facility will be effectively sequestered.
All of Metro Manila will be virtually shut down for the week. The economy will be in suspended animation. Ordinary citizens will be shut out from swathes of the city and homeless people have been collected and shipped out of sight.
The wonder of it all is that some of the most incompetent officials are expected to deliver effectively next week, the likes of Honrado and Abaya. Then there is what is called Murphy’s Law to deal with: if anything can go wrong, it will.
With the quality of officials elevated to their respective levels of incompetence by this administration, expect foul-ups to happen as a matter of course. It is not only the schools and businesses that will be “APEC-ted.” All of national government will be on virtual shutdown as everyone will be focused on the event.
The biggest suspense, as always, center around what will come out of President Aquino’s mouth as he plays host for this global event.
Recall that when Pope Francis called on the Palace earlier this year, Aquino delivered an unduly long speech plagued by pettiness and afflicted with lies. Compare his remarks with those so eloquently delivered by a high-minded Barack Obama when the Pope called on the White House a few months ago.
Beijing must have been so worried about what might emanate from Aquino’s mouth during the APEC summit. Earlier this week China’s foreign minister came to Manila to ensure that our President’s propensity for verbal sniping will be held in check. Some precautions have to be taken to shield the Chinese president from potential embarrassment.
Spin
Because of all the costs and all the disruption associated with hosting the APEC summit, our officials have gone to great lengths spinning exaggerated visions of what the country stands to gain from hosting this event.
The truth is, hosting the APEC meeting is a chore rotated among the member-economies. This is simply our turn to host this increasingly less important meeting.
The APEC, a brainchild of former US President Bill Clinton, is often derided as “four adjectives without a noun.” It is not a policy-making institution. Nor is it anything equipped to resolve differences as the UN might be.
Instead, meetings are held all year round among private sector representatives and senior officials of the member economies. The endless rounds of meetings are expected to build some sort of consensus and nurture a sense of community among the member-economies.
The many meetings held through the year feed into the “leaders’ meeting” where heads of state come together. This summit is not intended to issue a firm communiqué. It is really a photo opportunity to keep the idea of a large community of nations constantly refreshed in the public mind.
It is really the summit meeting that incurs the largest expense for the host economy designated to host APEC activities for the year. The cost of securing the leaders and staging the huge photo-op overshadows the cost of running all the ministerial meetings that happen through the year.
The first time we hosted the APEC summit meeting was in 1996. APEC was then a new idea and had less member-economies than today. The Ramos government wisely decided to host the event at Subic. That culminated in a memorable outdoor photo op for the leaders in a very secure place.
In this second hosting, the Aquino government so unwisely decided to host this humungous event in Manila – a choked and infra-deficient metropolis. That decision to host the summit in Manila now, as we know, requires closing down virtually the entire metropolitan area.
Amidst all the chaos this event will bring to the city, our officials will try to pitch the country as a tourist destination. So far, all we have managed to project is how gridlocked the city has been allowed to become and how deficient our airport is.
The tourism pitch will very likely backfire. About 1,300 flights had to be cancelled to make way for the VIP air traffic coming in and out for the miniscule Manila airport. We can expect minor delegates and foreign journalists to be stranded because of this.
We will also try to make an investment pitch to the visiting delegations – although none of them are really interested in that. The official theme for the APEC summit is a regional response to the threat from global warming.