Remembering Bobby Ongpin and his vision

Around this time last year, I drove up to the Cordillera gateway to celebrate a loved one’s birthday. It was around the witching hour when I left my home in Quezon City – still dark and eerily quiet as the country was still in deep slumber.

The rising sun greeted me as I made my way through the winding roads that lead up to Baguio, a place of childhood summers, adventures with friends and, during my university days, Philippine Collegian writers’ workshops; certainly the city was a place of fond memories.

But excited as I was to be back in the City of Pines, that cold morning of February last year turned out to be somber as the shocking news of tycoon Roberto “Bobby” Ongpin’s death greeted me as soon as I arrived. An avalanche of phone messages told me it was true.

He died the night before, Feb. 4, in his sleep, cradled in the arms of his beloved Balesin, that island paradise he built in Quezon, some 115 kilometers away from Manila.

I remembered being really stunned and sad with the news because Bobby, or RVO as I called him, was one of the sources I’d learned to appreciate through the years.

He granted every request for an interview I asked; answered nearly every question I popped; shared with me juicy off-the-record stories about government and business and regaled me with tales of his adventures and misadventures, never without his trademark humor and “evil streak.”

I respected him because he respected my role as a pesky journalist. I lost a good source and perhaps a friend, too.

But this isn’t really about Bobby and me.

Major industrial projects

I especially remember RVO now, a year since he died, because of this ongoing dizzying and ugly pitch for Charter change, supposedly to ease economic provisions to attract foreign investments into the country.

It was RVO, as minister of trade of Marcos Sr., who first envisioned turning the Philippines into an industrialized nation.

Journalist Tony Lopez, in an article published days after Ongpin’s death last year, summed it well:

“He was the most visionary of all Philippine ministers of trade and industry. Defying a colossal economic crisis, Minister Ongpin envisioned massive Philippine industrialization with his overarching 11 major industrial projects. These included an integrated steel mill, copper smelter, aluminum smelter, petrochemical complex, phosphate fertilizer plant, diesel engine manufacturing, cement industry expansion, integrated pulp and paper mill, heavy engineering industries and an alcogas plant.

“The MIPs would have transformed the Philippines into a NIC (newly industrializing country) almost overnight but a debt crisis, cronyism and the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. in 1986 sent Ongpin’s projects into oblivion.

“Today, those projects, if undertaken at 10 to 20 times their original costs, would still be valid and viable.”

This is the sad reality in our country today. We failed to industrialize.

Many businesses in the Philippines opted not to make big bets on heavy manufacturing, which could have created more jobs.

If our local businessmen poured more money into export-heavy industries, perhaps we wouldn’t need foreign investors that much.

Instead, we have a largely consumer-driven economy as we failed to develop domestic industries. Now we import a lot of what we need, even the same products we used to produce big time – from galunggong to rice to fruits.

House ways and means committee chairperson and Albay 2nd District Rep. Joey Salceda said this is just one of the arguments for easing economic provisions.

Doing so would lead to greater competition in the domestic market instead of our local companies and conglomerates just keeping their production and investments below competitive levels, he said.

Beyond easing economic provisions though, we need a more stable environment – from politics to business.

Jittery foreign investors

But look at what’s happening now. The Marcoses and the Dutertes are caught up in a bitter family feud.

Our lawmakers are acting like the children from “Lord of the Flies,” caught up in a battle between peace, savagery and power.

The biggest casualty is confidence. Some foreign businessmen are already asking what’s happening in the country now amid all the political noise and with the President and the ex-president trading accusations of drug use.

As I said before, dirty politics, corruption and political patronage are among the major stumbling blocks to our economy’s progress.

Changing the entire Constitution would be useless if we don’t embrace real, lasting change in society.

Unfortunately, the depths to which this nation of 114 million has fallen is dizzying and appalling. We just keep taking a few steps forward only to slide three steps back.

I think about the talk I had with Bobby Ongpin after the May 2022 presidential elections, days after Marcos Jr. was elected as the 17th president of the Republic of the Philippines.

He said I shouldn’t worry because he believed Marcos Jr. would do good.

Nearly two years later, RVO is gone and Marcos Jr. is still President but where are we now?

Somewhere tucked inside Ongpin’s 500-hectare Balesin island resort in Quezon is an unpaved road that leads to a banana plantation.

There’s an arch that says “BANANA REPUBLIC.”

I think of that sign now and realize exactly where we are or what we are, minus the bananas.

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Email: [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at EyesWideOpen on FB.