OPINIONS: NO PUBLIC ENTHUSIASM FOR EDSA REVOLT DAY / EDSA REVOLT: A JOURNEY
MANILA, FEBRUARY 24, 2007 (STAR) ROSES & THORNS By Alejandro R. Roces - Undoubtedly, the EDSA Revolution was a great historical event and we don’t mean only in Philippine history; we mean in world history. We know of no nation in world history that toppled a dictatorship without a single loss of life or even damage to property. But as we can see, toppling a tyrannical administration only has full meaning if the goals of the revolution are achieved after the takeover. The best proof that the people do not feel that the revolution achieved its full purpose is the fact that there is total public indifference to the coming 21st anniversary of the EDSA Revolution. The Marcoses fled to Hawaii and what the people remember were the 5,400 pairs of shoes that Imelda Marcos left behind. But the country has not seen a farthing of the billions of dollars that he allegedly accumulated during his dictatorial reign. And what we see of the Marcoses now is Imelda Marcos telling the TV audience that poverty in the Philippines can be totally eliminated. Has the Marcos wealth been brought back to the Philippines to help develop the country or is it still kept abroad? We would like to see a documented answer to this question.We repeat: the people are totally indifferent about the EDSA Anniversary celebration and it is because they can’t see what is there to celebrate. True, a dictatorship was toppled. But nothing in their lives has changed. To make things worse, terrorism is now a world problem. The first step to progress is peace and order with justice. There is no problem, national or international, that can be resolved by terrorism. Now, even the most advanced countries have to cope with terrorism.
The good thing is that compared to other countries, we are still lucky. We seem to have been spared of natural calamities and the peso is now one of the most stable currencies in the world. We were once the second most progressive country in Asia. After Marcos’ dictatorial rule, we became the second poorest Asian country, next to Bangladesh. Let us regain our status as one of the leading countries in Asia. It can be done.
OPINION: Journey FIRST PERSON By Alex Magno (MANILA) The Philippine Star 02/24/2007
Edsa is a road. The Edsa Revolution is a continuing journey.
The peaceful uprising, which held the rest of the world in awe, was the sum of too many coincidences that many have ventured to describe it a miracle. That is a comforting description. But it lulls us away from the hard analysis that needs to be done about the event and, more important, the direction to which we should take its aftermath.
The Edsa Revolution was driven by many naïve expectations. We thought that all it took was to restore democracy and all our problems would sort themselves out instantaneously.
Naïve as such expectation might have been, it precipitated the sort of inexplicable courage that brought Filipinos to block tanks with their bodies. Naïve expectation, too, brought about a rare moment of unanimity among our people.
That moment of consensus did not last very long, however. Soon, the new arrangement was threatened by military adventurism. The democracy established by the uprising has been the target of sustained assault by radical left-wing movements. There were moments, over the past two decades, when partisan bickering seemed to sap our democracy’s strength and bring the political order to the brink of chaos.
Over the last few years, I have advanced a number of observations that devotees of the "miraculous" nature of the Edsa Revolution found completely heretical.
Last year, during a conference on the Philippines held in Singapore, I pointed to charts that showed, among other things, inequality widening in since 1986, public investment declining, institutions such as public education decaying, per capita income barely growing and productivity stagnant during the same period. The cycles of boom and bust shortened after 1986 — except during the past five years where we have seen unprecedented sustained growth in per capita income.
From these charts, I drew the conclusion that the Edsa Revolution, by weakening the state and reviving populist politics, could have been a wrong turn as far as economic development was concerned. That conclusion drove another Filipino participant, my friend Melinda Quintos de Jesus, into a rage. She described my presentation as yet another of my "brilliant provocations."
I avoided expanding that debate before a largely foreign audience. But I pursued the point in the essay I wrote for this year’s Fookien Times Philippine Yearbook.
In a nutshell, I argued in that essay that, post-Edsa, we began cultivating an idea of democracy that meant disempowering the state. Reacting to the period of dictatorship, we shrunk the scope of executive power, equated transparency in governance with politicizing the policy-making process and interpreted "popular empowerment" with the pursuit of populist measures.
All those wreaked havoc on our policy architecture and prevented the evolution of institutions of leadership capable of leading the nation into a new century.
In the two decades after the Edsa Revolution, the Philippines became the Sick Man of Asia. Growth in our agriculture remained meager. Our competitiveness non-existent. Our infrastructure program seriously derailed. While global investments poured into East Asia, making 8% growth rates the norm, the Philippines received a smaller and smaller share of foreign direct investments.
Only in the last three years have we sustained growth at over 5%. Fortunately, the outlook is that we will continue growing at higher rates in the foreseeable future. But we have a lot of lost opportunities to make up for. All the political turbulence from "Edsa I" to "Edsa Dos" took its heavy toll, reflecting in continuing high rates of poverty and deteriorated social services.
Until we are able to purge the curse of excessive politicking from our civic culture, we will continue to perform way below our actual potential.
The 1987 Constitution enshrined the dead ideology of economic autarky. It introduced a system of short electoral cycles, party-list representation, a multiparty system that ensures minority presidencies and a two-chamber Congress that invites gridlock.
In the stupidity that pervaded our politics since then, we are constantly told that constitutional change would endanger our democracy. Influential groups preach a strange gospel: that it is preferable to have ineffectual governance that accept reforms that will produce decisive leadership for our nation.
The populist agrarian reform program enacted during the Aquino presidency has been a curse on our agricultural productivity. It resulted in a high food price regime that aggravated poverty. Even as arable land is our scarcest resource next to fresh water, the agrarian reform design now in place idled large tracts of otherwise productive farmland. It hindered capitalization of agricultural production and caused a high food price regime that aggravated poverty. It trapped our farmers in small "family-sized" plot that are, in fact, poverty traps.
The weak state installed after 1986 failed to solve the insurgency problem that now makes us vulnerable to terrorism. That weak state could pursue economic reforms only at a very slow pace, constantly dragged down by populist politics as well as the rearguard action waged by the guardians of dead ideologies.
We need to understand that democracy does not connote a weak state. Nor should "popular empowerment" make us captive to shortsighted populism.
The journey we embarked on after the overthrow of a corrupt dictatorship is still in progress.
As we look to the future, we should begin to understand that democracy can only truly succeed in liberating our people if it allows for effective governance. We should understand, as well, that the state is the entity for assuring the common good over the longer term. It should be sufficiently empowered to be freed from the politics of instant gratification that serves only short-range goals and narrow interests.
Chief News Editor: Sol Jose Vanzi
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