I RECALL WALKING down Ayala Avenue, the principal thoroughfare in Manila’s main central business district, in the year 2000 through a sea of yellow paper being thrown from the windows of the surrounding office blocks.
Yellow is the colour of political protest in the Philippines, and the “ticker tape” descending all around came mainly from shredded copies of the Yellow Pages. The streets were full of noisy crowds who were having a whale of a time, dancing and blowing horns.
As an expatriate I had, at least in my opinion, no right to protest despite having lived in the country for six years. I was just trying to get to my bank ATM when I was accidentally caught up in it all.
This particular protest was prompted by corruption allegations against the country’s then president Joseph Estrada, who was said to have been involved in a massive gambling scam involving bank accounts in false names and stacks of pesos in suitcases. It was an all too familiar story, the kind you read about in the lurid Filipino press every day back then – except this one involved the president.
That wasn’t supposed to happen given the often benighted country’s recent past. The Filipino people were still recovering from the 20-year kleptocracy of former president Ferdinand Marcos and his colourful wife Imelda, who together made off with billions of pesos that were the rightful property of the Philippines’ national treasury.
Never again, the people had said, as they tied yellow ribbons around the gun barrels of the tanks that had been sent in to defend the presidential couple. Imelda and Ferdinand fled by helicopter to safe haven in Hawaii and the first lady’s collection of two thousand pairs of designer shoes was soon discovered by the crowds that stormed the Malacanang palace. It was so very operatic that the fact the Marcoses have inspired a real opera should come as no surprise.
That bizarre mixture of reality and you-couldn’t-make-it-up drama has long been a signature of the Philippines. But that must stop. No more political operas.
This is a place where you need to break the mould to get things done
CURRENT PRESIDENT BENIGNO Aquino has recently been the subject of an impeachment motion based on the notion that he acted illegally in setting up an economic development fund without seeking ratification from both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
This typical piece of Filipino political mischief has been crafted at a time when the country has emerged as Asia’s second-fastest growing economy, has achieved investment-grade status from all three big ratings agencies and has reduced its debt to GDP burden to the lowest since that old thief Ferdinand took office in the mid-1960s.
Back in those days when the country was one of Asia’s richest, Manila seemed a natural place to house the newly established Asian Development Bank. The ADB’s presence in Manila has seemed somewhat incongruous ever since Marcos’s rifling of the Philippines’ coffers sent the country on a path to destitution with all the markers that involved, such as a stratospheric crime rate, rampant drug use and mass prostitution.
It’s got better in recent years, as I have written in this column before, and much better since Aquino took office four years ago. The man really has made a difference when it has come to tackling the Philippines’ two biggest woes: government corruption and a failure to collect taxes. His successful efforts on these two go a long way to explaining the rating agencies’ positive view of the country’s fundamentals.
Moreover, Aquino has galvanised the Philippines’ public-private partnership programme such that the country is now a sought-after destination for project finance capital. And all the evidence suggests that the judicious use of the development fund cash was also instrumental in propelling the Philippines last year to a 7.2% rate of GDP growth, its fastest in 15 years.
THIS IS A place where you need to break the mould to get things done. And that is something that president Aquino clearly understands.
Unfortunately for him, the small coterie of individuals who control about 80% of the Philippines’ wealth are not in the least bit keen to see the mould broken. On the contrary, they very much want it to be business as usual.
In his state of the nation speech delivered last week, Aquino demurred from attacking the impeachment issue but instead focused on his administration’s achievements in the face of the natural disaster of super typhoon Haiyan.
I can only hope, for the sake of the country, that he continues to spearhead the drive to transform the Philippines economy, and that the old guard of pampered Manila socialites do not prevail.
As the opposition burned Aquino’s effigy outside Congress during his speech you had to wonder to what extent this reflected the mood of the Filipino people. I, for one, hope that we will not be seeing yellow ticker tape raining down in Manila any time soon.
