Loida's vision

This is the year that the African-American made history. As President-elect Barack Obama would often say, this year was their moment.

But the African-American’s road to the White House — his most coveted destination next to heaven — was paved by many with their blood, sweat and tears.

This hit me even more last Thursday when I came face to face yet again with Loida Nicolas-Lewis — the widow of Reginald Lewis, the first black man to own a business in the US that broke that $1-billion mark. The first black man to have a swanky apartment on Fifth Avenue. The first black man to be accepted in Harvard even before he took its entrance tests.

Lewis was the richest African-American in the ’80s. According to reports, Lewis’ TLC Beatrice International became the US’ top black-owned business. The International Center for Law at Harvard was in fact renamed after Reginald Lewis.

Loida was Reginald’s match. A lawyer like him, she is the first Asian-American woman to pass the New York State Bar — a feat she accomplished without studying law in the United States.

After Reginald died of brain cancer in 1993, Loida led his TLC Beatrice International holdings to greater heights, before selling it in the late ’90s. Sources say she gave back to stakeholders 35 percent more than what they put in the company.

Loida today is said to be the richest Filipino living overseas. Though she lives in New York, Loida visits the Philippines regularly. “I have faith in the Filipino,” she told People Asia magazine. “I want to help. However, I am a businesswoman and I’m not about to just throw money away. I would like to think of myself as a good steward of the riches God has so blessed me with. This country has a lot of potential and I believe in that strongly.”

Aside from putting up businesses in the country, Loida, who is chairperson of TLC Beatrice LLC (the family investment firm), has also established a school in her husband’s name in her native Sorsogon.

Loida is active in several causes and unlike her other high-profile sister Mely Nicolas, she supports the Arroyo administration. (Mely was part of the so-called Hyatt 10 that broke away from the Arroyo administration in 2005.)

Still that doesn’t mean that Loida’s support is blind, for she is the chairperson of Bisyon 2020 — Business for Integrity and Stability of Our Nation 2020 — a business-initiated and business-led, non-stock, non-profit foundation that aims to fight corruption. Bisyon is committed to raising the Philippine Integrity Fund (PIF), which according to Loida, “is structured to be an endowment fund that will help minimize, if not totally wipe out, corruption in the Philippines by the year 2020.”

Having witnessed Edsa 1 and 2, I have seen that when big business turns off the taps of its support, any administration will shrivel and die.

With Loida in the board of trustees of Bisyon 2020 are senior business leaders and decision makers. PIF will fund deserving anti-corruption projects that have the potential to succeed and benefit the economy and the citizenry. (Bisyon may be reached at tel. no. 811-2020.)

Bisyon is spearheading the First Integrity and Human Rights Conference on Dec. 9 and 10 at the Hyatt Hotel in Malate, Manila, which was launched last Thursday at the SGV Building in Makati. The conference aims to establish the link between corruption and human rights.

Reginald Lewis achieved what was doubly difficult for a black man to achieve — fortune, recognition and acceptance. And he gave back to his people.

His widow is working for something just as difficult — helping slay the dragon that is corruption, before it devours the land of her birth.

She, too, is giving back to her people.

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