A nation divided
CONSISTENT with the view that the country is not moving forward
fast enough in a manner and direction of meaningful growth
and sustained development --- economically, politically, socially
and culturally --- we feel it is time to look at one of the
major causes of this condition.
The need to forge a national consensus, a vision or a national
ideology and its subsequent translation into a collective
will participated in by a critical mass of our people who
are imbued by a higher level of discipline, morality and respect
for the law is the only way where that feeling of togetherness,
of being a part in the building of a truly sovereign nation-state
of which we can all be proud of can be established.
How then can this elusive groundswell of a people's collective
will be set in motion if the institutions of law, economics,
politics, and our own peculiar socio-cultural mores remain
frail and immature relative to the level of discipline and
morality that sustainable growth and development demand?
A people so fractious, divided by more than 7000 islands,
with stubborn attachment to particular ethnic, regional and
linguistic identities, cannot hope to stand together, and
with dedication, move forward meaningfully.
For the truth is, notwithstanding claims to the contrary by
both our past and present leaders, their allies in the country's
economic and political oligarchies, hypocritical church leaders,
politicking military leaders, and generally opportunistic
middle class professionals, very few Filipinos have the country's
good future in their hearts.
From the prism of this class or sectoral groupings, these
elites of Philippine society celebrate growth and development
not from the perspective of the country's teeming poor but
on how their economic and political standings in society have
improved through time.
How then can we explain meaningful economic growth amid the
continuous widening of the gap between the country's growing
multitudes and the increasing concentration of wealth in the
hands of a decreasing number of rich people? The continuous
impoverishment of the country's fifty-five to sixty per cent
alone (43-47 million of about 78 million Filipinos) should
awaken us into reviewing our growth targets and strategies.
For instance, while improving the base of the country's capital
market (a key economic/financial goal), banks, stock exchanges
and other financial intermediaries are inundated with money
and give huge financial returns to their owners/investors.
Yet funds for our agri-agra programs, land reform, poverty
alleviation (including provisions for job-generating and collateral-
deficient projects), small borrowers continued to be hamstrung
by limited funds. This condition shows that success in one
economic sector is being paid off by another. While banks
are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer --- paradoxically
due to limited access to loanable funds.
Development experts may counter that the county's growth potentials
should not be measured by such skewed or assymetrical sectoral
groupings, but by the way the country's middle class is expanding.
True enough, this is what the financial giant IMF/World Bank
is prescribing us to think and do. But is this really what
is happening? Official NEDA figures for the past decade (1991-1999)
show that the so-called "expanding" middle class
actually comes from the side of the rich sector and definitely
not from those living below the poverty level (which continue
to expand in number).
If this trend is juxtaposed to average inflation rates over
the same period, the resulting figure shows a continued decrease
in the people's average real income and wages. And as prices
of basic commodities and services continue to increase (about
9% for the same period), the inevitable result is clearly
the expansion of the sector living below the poverty level.
Politically, not a few of our ever party-jumping politicians
are saying that ours is a thriving and mature democratic system
of government. This is far from the truth. For how else can
we explain the almost the same prominent names and families
that continue to hug the limelight in the country's political
structures, both national and local? Congress has yet to legislate
a constitutional provision to enact a law banning political
dynasties, yet because the move clearly goes against the interests
of the very same persons now dominating Congress and the Executive
department, we doubt if this provision could ever see the
light of day.
Can we then honestly claim to have a truly working democracy?
Or do we really have an effective and efficient two- or multi-party
system --- with alternative party platforms clothed with sincerity
and the desire to implement them? The country's political
system has become so parochial and expensive that only the
economic elite and traditional politicians (with very few
exceptions) have clear and effective advantage of becoming
successful politicians. As our system of politics is but a
hodgepodge of an elitist ideology, so is the kind of elitist
leadership we can ever hope for.
Socially and culturally, we remain to this day, a people sadly
divided by tribal and regional ethnicities. Christians have
yet to squelch from their mental and spiritual biases what
it means to be a Filipino Muslim. An Ilocano is different
from a Batangueno, a Bicolano, a Tagalog or a Cebuano. Among
our Muslim brothers in Mindanao, a Tausug is different from
a Maguindanaoan, or one from the Lanao provinces. In school
campuses, regional and linguistic student groupings compete
among themselves. And are not Filipino social and civic groups
in many parts of the US as ethnically fractious and disparate
as those in the country?
A few noisy leftists and anarchists continue to denounce US
imperialism while down in their heart of hearts are aping
for Coke, Pepsi and McDonald hotdogs and sandwiches --- clearly
bourgeois and non-proletarian tastes --- given the fact that
they are a people of a 3rd World country characterized by
a "semi-feudal and semi-colonial" society, as CPP
founding chairman Jose Ma. Sison so eloquently prescribed.
While Sison and ex-priest Luis Jalandoni breathe free air
in the comfort of Utrecht in the Netherlands, their pawns
in the country's communist chess game continue to trudge the
inhospitable jungles of Mts. Banahaw and Sierra Madre, even
as their jittery urban partisans prepare for yet another anti-US
demo in front of the US embassy.
They are awed by American power, modernism and technology,
that's why they must persist in denouncing America --- more
to appear different from others than to a genuine commitment
to a dying ideology. They will oppose and connect ludicrously
the then contentious Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) with
claims for higher workers' wages, because a few of our labor
groups is in reality fronts of the CPP-NPA-NDF, the group
recently labeled by the US as terrorists --- in the same league
as Bin Laden's al-Qaeda and the pesky Abu Sayyaf and Pentagon
kidnap-for-ransom groups. Through luck, some of their prominent
leaders managed to become "honorable" members of
the present Congress, via the party-list system. One wonders
where their baggage of anarchic negativities can lead them,
or whether they are truly for a Filipino nationhood, or for
in fact destroying the very foundations of a would-be globally
competing sovereign country.
Also in connection with same VFA issue, we have seen of late
how an ideologically-inclined Vice President and Foreign Affairs
Secretary Teofisto Guingona has pathetically surrendered to
his pragmatic calling in order to insure his political survival
and relevance.
A nation divided to the seams clearly has little chance of
becoming a strong country. Changes in the country's political
leaderships coming from one political elite to another are
political charades with shallow and vacuous end results. We
can continue dreaming of more "people power" revolutions
to our heart's content, or as a desperate and excited urban
proletariat can ever concoct, yet remain moored in the same
level of poverty when the hoopla of shouting and denunciations
finally settle down.
Surely we have gaping differences as a people, but these differences
are something we should learn to live with, not something
to fight about. We must aim for unity, and thus leave behind
the sad reality of a nation divided. *
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