ANGAT BUHAY: A DIFFERENT DRUM

 

“What’s wrong with the Philippines?”

It’s a banner of the post-election column by Gwynne Dyer, an independent journalist based in London, England, published in various foreign newspapers like London Free Press, Bangkok Post, and The Standard. Factoring in an out-of-the-box thinking and an objective viewpoint, let’s look into the pertinent excerpts of his column:

“[Marcos Jr.] won it by a two-to-one landslide, despite being the extremely entitled son of a former president who stole at least $10 billion and a mother who spent the loot partly on the world’s most extensive collection of designer shoes (3,000 pairs).

“The Philippines is a leading contender for the “world’s most populist country” title, which is hard to explain because its lost twin behaves quite differently. Just west of the Philippines is Indonesia, another multi-island country whose people are ethnically and linguistically very close to the Filipinos.

“However, since Indonesia became a democracy, it has elected only presidents who were neither killers nor thieves, while the Filipinos hurl themselves enthusiastically at any plausible fraud with a bit of notoriety. Why?

“Two hypotheses, both weak, come to mind. First, the Philippines has an unusually powerful elite of big, rich families with strong regional bases. This week’s vote, for example, was shaped by a recent alliance between the Marcos (northern and central Philippines) and Duterte (southern Philippines) families.

“The other hypothesis? Ninety-nine percent of adult Filipinos are online, and Filipinos aged 16 to 64 spend on average nearly four hours a day connected to social networks.”

ENCHANTING ARCHIPELAGO

Mr. Dyer deemed his two hypotheses as weak, and rightly so. Both fell flat in pinning down the crux of the problem. Interestingly, the crux is embedded in a rare old article with the same title “What’s wrong with the Philippines” written in 1968 by the slain Senator Benigno S. Aquino Sr. way back when Marcos Sr. had become president for three years and four years before he declared the Martial Law. Here are pertinent excerpts of such article:

“A diplomat… once christened the [Philippine] islands an “enchanting archipelago”… The trouble is that there is one vital natural resource that has not been properly developed: the people.

“Beneath the outpourings of self–serving government data, hidden underneath trappings of the good life in the big cities, there remains a depressed and dispirited people. Against the yardstick not of statistics but on the quality of life, the Filipino people as a whole are a melancholy – if patient – mass. Their daily diet is monotonous (rice, fish, vegetable), their clothes are threadbare and their homes primitive and crowded. What could they hope to build on a daily per capita income of just over 25 cents? In sum, the blessings of liberty have not included liberation from poverty.

“Here is a land in which a few are spectacularly rich while the masses remain abjectly poor. Gleaming suburbia clashes with the squalor of slums. Here is a land where freedom and its blessings are a reality for minority and an illusion for the many. Here is a land consecrated to democracy but run by an entrenched plutocracy. Here, too, are a people whose ambition runs high, but whose fulfillment is low and mainly restricted to the self-perpetuating elite.

“Here is a land of privilege and rank – a republic dedicated to equality but mired in an archaic system of caste.”

CRUX OF THE MATTER: POOR ELECTORATE

Fifty-four years ago, that was the plight of the poor Filipinos. Today, their plight has not changed, if not worsened, due to the pandemic. The number of Filipinos in poverty has now risen to over 26 million, just a bit under 25% of the population, or a ratio of 1 in every 4 Filipinos. Cropping up from this bulk of the poor is the kind of electorate predominating every election cycle: 5 in 10 unemployed, 4 in 10 high school graduates, and 6 in 10 class C & D (pre-pandemic statistics). Subsequently, it has inflicted our country with an Electoral Integrity Index of 58.8 on a 0 to 100 scale, ranking the Philippines 76^th out of 107 countries as covered by the Sydney and Harvard universities’ study. Interestingly, interpolating the IQ table of values, the PH electorate could be classified as borderline – a notch over a “moron.” This bulk of the electorate – economically “vulnerable” and therefore easily “corruptible” – has predominated our election cycle for many years. No wonder the International Observer Mission (IOM), has presented its interim report on the May 9 elections as “not free and fair,” citing rampant vote buying, among other irregularities, it observed.

Only when our country gets to the bottom of our poverty problem will we, as a people, extricate ourselves from this perpetual election bind. Is there hope for our country?

ANGAT BUHAY

One answer: ANGAT BUHAY, to be launched on July 1, will directly address the plight of the poor Filipinos "nasa laylayan" – the last, the least, and the lost.

It is a non-governmental organization (NGO), just like other NGOs, a nonprofit entity, generally formed independently from the government, characterized by a high degree of public trust, and to eventually be a proxy in untangling and ending the poverty problem.

Existed for centuries, the NGO had its first international organization believed to be the Anti-Slavery Society formed in 1839. Likewise, according to the Britannica website, the term nongovernmental organization was coined at about the time of the founding of the United Nations (UN) in 1945 to distinguish private organizations from inter-government organizations (IGOs), such as the UN itself.

A concrete example is BRAC -- formerly Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee -- the world’s largest NGO with a $4.6 billion portfolio in microloans and an army of healthcare volunteers. In its heyday, it provided care to 80 million Bangladeshis and carried a network of 52,000 schools serving 1.5 million students.

A cutting edge NGO is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation whose attributes, taken from the PeopleBrowsr website, are shown below:

Headquarters: Seattle, Washington

Founder: Melinda Gates & Bill Gates

CEO: Susan Desmond-Hellman

Purposes: Education, Healthcare, and Ending Poverty

Area Served: Worldwide

Source of Funds: Donations and Grants

Mission Statement: Our mission is to create a world where every person has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life.

Core Values: Optimism, Rigor, Inclusion, Innovation, Collaboration, Diversity, Responsibility & Accountability, and Community Involvement.

Marching to the beat of a different drummer, the July 1 launch of the ANGAT BUHAY has spooked the winning camp – not as an existential threat, but as a knee-jerk reaction to possible competition. What competition could be nobler than competing on who could end much quicker and more earnestly our country’s poverty problem?

 As Steve Jobs said:

“You can’t look at the competition and say you’re going to do it better. You have to look at the competition and say you’re going to do it differently.”