First off, let me congratulate and extend my best wishes to Bryner Diaz and Jean Marvette Demecillo who are getting married this Saturday at the St. Joseph church in Mabolo, Cebu City. Bryner and Jean were reporters for this paper when I was its editor-in-chief. Like the good reporter that she was, Jean managed to track me down four years into my retirement with the good news and an invite. Thank you guys for remembering.
* * *
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is calling for support for the proposed Maharlika Wealth Fund, a sovereign investment initiative that is about to be blown out of the water by intense skepticism. The presidential appeal would have been unnecessary had he exercised due diligence in right at the inception of the bill. The bill now pending in the House was authored by Speaker Martin Romualdez and Rep. Sandro Marcos.
To those who were born only yesterday, Romualdez is a first cousin of the president while Rep. Marcos is, of course, a presidential son. And while the executive and legislative branches of government are separate from each other, it does not follow that one must be unaware of what the other is doing. In other words, Marcos could not have been in the dark about the Maharlika bill.
The Maharlika bill initially intended to raise more than a hundred billion in funds to be sourced from the SSS, GSIS, DBP, Landbank, and other government financial institutions and then pour them into high-yield investments to finance the country's priority development programs. The idea is not only good, it is also not new. Other countries have their own sovereign funds. Handled well, it will indeed be a windfall.
But everybody associated with the bill, including Marcos himself who must have been in on it from the beginning, were clearly thinking only of the end result. They never considered how to get there first. They forgot they are in the Philippines where everything without exception is highly politicized. Clearly, they started counting the chicks before there even was a hen to lay an egg.
Marcos must still be heady from his remarkable election victory that gave him an unprecedented 31-million-plus votes. Worse, he must have deluded himself into believing the votes were a manifestation of love and adulation. They were not. Partly they were a repudiation of a tired and mostly fake narrative peddled by enemies and partly to a willingness to move on regardless of who leads the country anywhere but here.
Had Marcos nursed the proper equilibrium, he would have noticed right away that words like Maharlika, money, and Marcos, interestingly all beginning with the letter "M" have the uncanny ability to make many people uncomfortable, even allergic. Marcos could have counselled his cousin and son to maybe drop the word Maharlika and, if the fund was more important than the authorship, to have the bill credited to others.
But because Marcos did not have the foresight to anticipate the pitfalls, the bill is now floundering. It has already jettisoned the SSS and GSIS as funding sources to appease ignorant critics pandering the lie that SSS and GSIS funds are never invested but just lie dormant in a box waiting to be disbursed on demand to the members who own them. If that were the case, uninvested idle SSS and GSIS funds would have long evaporated.
Marcos has to get used to the fact that even if he is now the president legitimately elected by the biggest margin ever in Philippine history, he is still a Marcos damned to carry a heavy historical baggage forever. If he is ever to succeed, he must learn to factor that into everything he does. The Maharlika bill without Maharlika, and without the Marcos and Romualdez names, would not have been as bad as it sounds. It is in fact damn good.