Torn and frayed in Manila

Noynoy is repeating his mother’s mistakes

The duelling cabinet ministers in Noynoy Aquino’s cabinet are reminiscent of the internecine strife that crippled the administration of his mother, Cory Aquino (1986–1992).

Cory’s weak leadership and inability to control her squabbling cabinet members emboldened coup plotters like Gringo Honasan and led to a puny list of accomplishments at the end of her 6-year term.

Her first defense secretary, Juan Ponce Enrile, was in virtually open rebellion before he was forced to resign in November 1986. Her vice president, Salvador Laurel, sniped at the president and her supporters throughout their terms.

In the first 3 years of the administration, a faction led by NEDA Director-General Winnie Minsod (which argued that the Philippines should not repay debts incurred under the Marcos administration) battled a group led by Finance Minister Vicente R. Jayme and Central Bank Jose B. Fernandez (which believed the country needed to fulfil its international obligations). Monsod lost and resigned in 1989.

When Aquino did come down strongly in support of one side or another in cabinet rows she did not always choose her battles wisely. On one of the most divisive issues of her administration, the US bases agreement, she threw her weight solidly behind the retention of the bases, a position that was out of touch with the mood in the country and in the Congress. The Senate’s rejection of the renewal of the agreement in the last year of her administration was a humiliation for the president who’s pro-US stance on the issue typified her poor political touch.

And let’s not get into the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program …

Like mother, like son
Noynoy appears unable to accept criticism of his cabinet favourites, especially of his shooting range buddy, interior undersecretary Rico “they’re all out to get me” Puno, who claims to be the target of five other “groups” within the administration.

Here is the PCIJ’s description of the president’s reaction to the first report on the Quirino grandstand bus siege:

ON THE day he received the 82-page report of the Incident Investigation and Review Committee (IIRC) about the Rizal Park Hostage-taking Incident – and without even a full reading of its contents – President Benigno Simeon C. Aquino III had blurted out: “Napatapang ‘ata masyado ah. Bakit kasama pa sila Puno, Lim, at Verzosa?” [It’s too strongly worded. Why are we implicating Puno, Lim and Verzosa?]

Noynoy’s solution was to send the IIRC report to another panel made up of his legal counsel de Mesa and executive secretary Paquito Ochoa. As a result of this second panel’s watered down report, the president has decided that none of the officials involved in the 23 August bus debacle were criminally liable. Not surprisingly, this has led to intense speculation that Justice Secretary Leila de Lima, chair of the committee that wrote the original report, was going to resign (de Lima said yesterday that she is staying).

The government’s response to the failed bus siege is starting to look almost as bungled as the event itself.

Amando Doronila sums up what all this says about Noynoy’s leadership style:

Although no severe penalties emerged from the two investigations—that of the IIRC and the Ochoa panel—the procedures revealed President Aquino’s style of handling crisis and discord in his Cabinet and higher bureaucracy.

He is not prepared to sack Cabinet members found wanting in the discharge of their duties, although at the earlier stage of the inquiry into the hostage crisis, he declared “heads will roll” for the hostage debacle. That he had to create two layers of committees to inquire into the episode suggests indecisiveness to act on delicate and sensitive issues.

In clearing Puno and then Philippine National Police Director General Jesus Verzosa, who was directly in charge of police forces, the President said, “All of us are people, none of us is perfect.”

A house divided against itself cannot stand
It’s early days and Noynoy, who has very little management experience to my knowledge, is presumably learning from these bruising battles. Let’s hope so because the country needs the son to be a better team leader than his mother was.

He has to be tougher than her, to squash the squabbling between his associates, and to be ruthless when needed. Unlike Cory, who, in the words of Joel Rocamora, “allowed her brother to sabotage the reform process by recruiting KBL and other unsavory trapo (traditional politician) types" into the ruling party, Noynoy has to end the perceptions of cronyism that the recent headlines about Puno have generated. If not, he will spend the next 6 years looking inward instead of focusing on the many problems and opportunities he was elected to address.

Is jueteng so bad?

Noynoy has told Jesse Robredo, the newly appointed Interior and Local Government Secretary, to clamp down on jueteng, an illegal numbers game that has been a thread running through Philippine public life for the last 10 years, touching both the previous two presidents.

Still, when it comes down to it, I can’t see that jueteng is so different from the many forms of state-sponsored gambling in the Philippines.

Jueteng employs tens of thousands of people, many of whom don’t have too many other options, as the film Kubrador showed. So a successful clamp-down on jueteng will take income away from many people who need it to survive.

The bets cast by millions of Filipinos every week indicate a demand for small-stakes betting that is not met by Lotto. Jueteng brings punters door-to-door personalized service and they like that.

If you believe in the market, surely the answer is to legalize jueteng, tax it heavily, and get the state out of gambling. The clamp down seems hypocritical when the state is so heavily involved in casinos and lotteries.

Noynoy’s instruction also seems to confirm a lack of empathy with the needs of the poor. In the short term all this will mean for poor people is hassle, greater police presence in the barangay, and ever larger pay-offs to corrupt policemen and politicians to encourage them to look the other way. It is revealing that the only candidate to support the legalization of jueteng was Erap, whose constituency is most affected by the criminalization of the game.

Let’s face it, Jesse Robredo ain’t going to be able to “stamp out” jueteng. I doubt whether there is anyone in the country who thinks that will happen. We will have the usual six-month fanfare, a few low-profile arrests, and then it will be back to where we were. So what’s the point apart from appeasing Archbishop Oscar Cruz?

Incidentally, today’s Inquirer reminded me of this interesting little story:

In May 2005, Wilfredo Cimanis Mayor, a confessed jueteng operator, testified at a Senate hearing that then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s son, then Pampanga Rep.Juan Miguel “Mikey” Arroyo, two other congressmen, and a former lawmaker used to send bagmen to collect gambling pay-offs from him.

Mayor said he was given Mikey Arroyo’s alleged bagman, Arturo Naguit, a former vice-mayor of Minalin, Pampanga, P600,000 a month as protection money.

Mikey Arroyo denied the accusation.

Mayor was killed in an ambush in Pasay city in February.

So I guess that was convenient for Mikey then.

Does the Philippines need a strongman?

A friend just pointed me to Josh Weinstein’s interesting blog on development in the Philippines. The subtitle of his most recent post on the recent election is “the case for a strongman.”

His main point of comparison is China, where in the last 25 years an authoritarian government has managed to raise an incredible 600 million people from poverty. During the same period the Philippines has puttered along, one step forward and two steps backward, with a political class growing bloated on public funds and poverty levels rising to 40% of the population.

In the most recent World Bank Ease of Doing Business Survey, the Philippines lies in 144th place (out of 183), behind all other Southeast Asian countries apart from Cambodia and Laos, both, interestingly, run by “strongmen.” This pitiful ranking, below 20 African countries and Iran (yup, it is easier to set up shop in Ahmadinejad’s Tehran than Arroyo’s Manila), surely drives a stake through Gloria’s claims to have improved the economy during her 9 long years in power. Incidentally, for the category “starting a business” the Philippines does even worse, it is 162 out of 183, a position among the world’s “failed states” that will not surprise anyone who has tried to hack their way through the tangled mess of licences required to start the smallest business here.

While the outgoing president has bragged of her achievements, the bare minimum has been spent on education, health, or infrastructure, again in marked contrast to China.

The results of last week’s election, though not the worst possible by a long way, don’t offer hope for an immediate escape from this wearying cycle of political stasis and economic decline. The president-elect, while personally clean, has a very limited record of achievement; the 12 new or re-elected senators are, by and large, clowns; congressmen and women are already showing much more interest in the spoils of office than in passing legislation to develop the country; the new chief justice was appointed under dubious circumstances, apparently with the main objective of keeping the person who appointed him out of jail … given all this, is it any wonder there is a desire to sweep away all this malfunctioning political machinery with one sweep of a strongman’s arm?

Except of course that the Philippines has already felt the lash of the strongman’s arm. Josh Weinstein points out that:

… if you ask a lot of Filipinos who was the best of the last five presidents, many will still say Marcos. He had some positive-minded reforms, despite helping himself and his cronies to the treasury of the country. And, at the very least, he could get things done, which is more than can be said about the current political system.

I guess he is right that you can find people who look back wistfully to the days of a man who could “get things done.” There may even be something in the claim of Blas Ople, the Secretary of Labour under Marcos, that the Philippines’ infrastructure was largely built during the first Marcos administration. But overall, I don’t see how it could be argued that the thousands of dissidents killed or imprisoned (3,257 killed, 35,000 tortured, and 70,000 incarcerated, as estimated by Alfred McCoy), the suspension of democracy during over 10 years of martial law, or the nepotism and breath-taking corruption of the last 20 years of Marcos could possibly form a model for the future.

A much better example would be the Ramos administration from 1992 to 1998, a period of political stability and economic growth. Ramos helped to deregulate the nation's major industries and put in place a more business-friendly culture than has existed before or since. One of his greatest achievements was to forge a workable political compromise in Mindanao. Ramos wasn’t perfect or free from the taint of the corruption himself (as in the AMARI and Fort Bonifacio deals), but he left his successor with a decent platform on which to build. Unfortunately, his successor was Erap.

The Philippines has to get itself back to 1998 and start again. By the end of the second Aquino presidency in 2016, the Philippines will not be an economic powerhouse, but doesn’t have to be a basket case either. The country has many advantages, a hardworking and creative people, a democratic structure, a nascent but rapidly growing call center and back office sector, vast remittances, enormous untapped tourist potential, and so on. Although Noynoy’s own record is limited, his administration promises to be progressive in tone. Many of the “Hyatt 10” who deserted the leaky Arroyo galleon will be back. Dinky Soliman has already agreed to return to her old post at the Department of Social Welfare. I am hopeful that Bill Luz will return to the Department of Education, possibly as Secretary.

If I can rouse myself from my blogging lethargy, I’ll try to talk about some of these specific areas of potential in the next few weeks. Despite everything, I am full of hope that the Philippines is wobbling back on track after 12 wasted years. It will need plenty of strong men and women to support it over the next 6 years, but no strongmen please.

He’s nuts! Or is he?

There is still a huge stigma against mental illness and drug use, especially when they are linked to candidates for public office, so, while it is contemptible that Manny Villar should strive so hard to make capital out of a supposed psychiatric report of his rival Noynoy Aquino’s from 1996, it is not surprising. Of course it is beyond contemptible if, as the Aquino camp asserts, the document was forged by people working on the Villar campaign. A dirty trick like that would put Villar right up with Gordon Liddy, Chuck Colson, and the rest of the Watergate team.

We’ll have to see whether this will become just another speck of mud in an increasingly personal campaign, or whether it grows into something more substantial. I would think that the Aquino-Roxas campaign must be a bit concerned by this development since the image of the candidate that emerges from the document—depressed solitary drinker, heavy smoker of tobacco and marijuana, poor cognitive skills, sexually repressed—is not a reassuring presidential profile. Senator Eagelton's short-lived career as McGovern's running mate in 1972 is a good example of what can happen to a candidate once a previous history of treatment for mental illness is exposed.

When will Erap withdraw in favour of Villar?

Despite his typically bombastic claim that he will never drop out of the presidential election—“I will have to die first before that happens”—I am sure that Erap is only too aware that the price of his withdrawal will have increased significantly after the latest SWS survey.

The sudden increase in Aquino’s lead to 9 points (from 2 points in the February poll), reversed a worrying decline in his support from 46% (5-10 December) to 42% (21-24 January) to 36% (24-28 February). The widening gap between the two frontrunners in March had less to do with Aquino’s shoring up of his support (his share was basically the same—36% in February and 37% in March) than with the surprising drop in Villar’s support (34% in February turned into 28% in March) and the equally unexpected increase in Estrada’s share (from 15% to 19%).

Look at it from Erap’s point of view. He surely knows that this little fart of support will not be enough to propel him back to Malacañang. He doesn’t have the funding to sustain a serious challenge in the home stretch and, despite his overwhelming sense of grievance, he must know that coming in third is not going to prove anything. On the other hand, while the role of kingmaker will not gratify his vanity in the same way as the victory he craves, it will allow him to influence the destiny of the country again. And if he is sincere about his desire to improve the lot of the people, he will surely be able to add some of his policies (if he has any) to the Villar platform. Finally, there is the potentially huge financial pay-off he can demand (especially if the deal includes him campaigning for Villar). Erap has always had his price.

Meanwhile, Manny has had a tough couple of weeks and desperately needs to regain momentum. It has been an open secret for months that Villar and his ally Mike Verlarde have been trying to persuade Estrada to drop out and to avoid splitting the “pro-poor” vote. A survey earlier this year indicated that, if Estrada were to drop out, his vote would be split roughly equally between Aquino and Villar but I find that a little hard to believe. In any case, Villar’s masa credentials will surely be enhanced if Erap can be “persuaded” to prostitute himself on the Villar campaign.

Let’s see what would happen if two-thirds of Erap’s vote were to go to Villar and one-third to Aquino, based on the March survey.

Aquino: 37% + 6.5% (one third of Erap’s vote) = 43.5%

Villar: 28% + 12.5% (two thirds of Erap’s vote) = 40.5%

That’s an easily bridgeable divide.

Manny is bound to look at the cruel economics of elections from a business point of view. If he loses, he has just pissed away billions of pesos for … nothing. Absolutely nada. As Macbeth said:

“I am in pesos stepped in so far that should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

Manny can’t stop wading now. Purely from a business point of view, he has no choice but to pay Erap to carry him to the other side (and to bill the Filipino people when he gets there).

I’m betting that the greasy fingers of the Erap and Villar camps are stitching up a deal as I type this.

Ping Lacson: They seek him here, they seek him there

Even by Philippine standards, the manhunt for Ping Lacson in the 188 member countries of Interpol has an absurd feel to it.

I especially liked the revelation that Ping was spotted by Jinggoy Estrada in Hong Kong.

The eldest son of ousted President Joseph Estrada said he saw Lacson strolling with wife Alice at the ground level of the famous Ocean Terminal and shopping center in Tsim Sha Tsui.

He said he and his wife Precy were likewise strolling on the second level.

Despite the bad blood between them, Estrada said he did not hesitate to call Lacson’s attention: “Ping! Ping!” he shouted, using the other man’s nickname.

He said Lacson appeared startled but yelled back: “Who’s with you?”

He said the Lacsons waved and then disappeared in the crowd of holiday shoppers.

Ha, ha – too good! “Who’s with you?” – did Ping think he had strayed into one of Jinggoy’s movies and was about to be rubbed out Kuratong Balaleng style in the final scene?

I wonder whether the police forces of the Interpol countries will feel that their time is well spent hunting down Lacson when the authorities in his home country have proved so lackadaisical in taking action against him.

Ping has not exactly been cowering under a stone in the nine years since the grisly murder of publicist Bubby Dacer and his unfortunate driver Emmanuel Corbito in November 2000. In fact Lacson has been almost too visible, running two successful senatorial campaigns and one unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2004 (in which he managed to split the opposition to Arroyo and let her in for a second term).

Nor is Ping’s alleged role in the double murder anything new. Ever since witnesses to the gruesome murder emerged in early 2001, Ping’s former staff have been busy fleeing to the States (Aquino and Mancao in July 2001, Dumlao in May 2003), getting conveniently murdered (Viña in May 2003), or spilling the beans (Mancao in February 2009).

Yet the glacial progress of Philippine justice meant that charges were not filed until 7 January 2010, by which time, as the Jinggoy anecdote above shows, Lacson had already flown the coop.

This timing may not be coincidental. Lacson was one of the main critics of presidential candidate Villar’s C5 road scam (see next post). If, as the rumours go, the administration has forged a deal with Villar, this sequence of events means that (1) a prominent Villar and Arroyo critic is out of the way, (2) the chance of a messy pre-election trial with claims and counter claims is reduced, and (3) the Philippine cops will be saved the unedifying task of arresting their former boss on a double murder charge.

The whole thing seems to be a charade and if there is even one reader out there who thinks it will end up with Ping serving time I’d be very surprised.

Finally, another bizarre twist to this tale is the unexpectedly high showing in the latest Senate opinion poll of Alex Lacson, an inoffensive Chauncey Gardner type figure who has written a book called 12 Little Things Every Filipino Can Do to Help Our Country. If you find it surprising that having the same family name as a man being sought in 188 countries on a double murder rap would increase your chance of being elected senator you probably need a refresher course in Philippine political logic. There will be plenty on offer in the next three and a half months.

Winnie Monsod on how Villar benefited from the unnecessary C5 extension

Erap: it's all about me

I've been meaning for weeks to write about how Estrada's reasons for running are always purely egotistical: I wasn't able to finish my term, I was robbed, and so on.

Today's Inquirer editorial says it perfectly:

MANILA, Philippines—The presidential bid of Joseph Estrada can be summarized in three words: it is about I, Me and Myself. He is the male counterpart of the faded silent movie-era star Nora Desmond in Billy Wilder’s classic film, “Sunset Boulevard.” It tells of a failed screen writer who gravitates to Desmond, who dreams of making a cinematic comeback. In the end she kills the screenwriter in a jealous fit, and ends up losing all touch with reality, thinking that the news crews covering the murder are a film crew that has begun filming her comeback role.

One of the Nora Desmond character’s famous lines is “I am big! It’s the pictures that got small.” In his mind, Joseph Estrada is still the big shot matinee idol, champion and idol of the masses; but the reality is it’s his fantasy of relevance that has enlarged over time even as his box office and electoral clout has diminished.

For more, see Erap's absurd pronouncement after Comelelec's spineless statement last week:

“I want to be king again myself (and) recover my throne that was stolen from me”

Computerized elections in the Philippines: It’s too late to stop now

The sense of foreboding over the computerization of the 2010 election continues to swell. In yesterday’s Inquirer the chairman of the Makati Business Club, Ramon del Rosario, called for automated elections to be scrapped. In his view the consequences of a breakdown are too great: “A failure of the 2010 elections is simply not an option.”

Concerns about the insufficient time left to deliver the machines, fix the source codes, decide which names should go on each of 1,630 ballots (since each ballot will contain local candidates in each town and municipality), print the 1,630 ballots and distribute them to the polling stations, and train teachers and others to supervise the elections and the count were also voiced last week by former chief justice Raul Pangalangan (and reinforced by him in today’s paper).

On the possible implications of failed computerized elections, see Antonio C. Abaya’s scary column last month.

Still, if a failure of elections is not an option, nor is giving up the attempt to computerize them. Surely we are too far down the road to turn back now? Comelec and the outgoing Arroyo administration have to drive on and ensure that, against the odds, computerized elections are carried out efficiently in May. We can take solace from the fact that the Philippines has already conducted a successful computerized election, in ARMM in August 2008.

This is, of course, the second time the Philippines has tried to computerize elections this decade. Remember the P1.3 billion Mega Pacific Solutions poll automation deal that was scotched by the Supreme Court in 2005? Those counting machines remain rotting in a warehouse to this day, completely unused. Another failed attempt would mean we will be left with a manual system for the foreseeable future, driving the country further back into the 20th century while the rest of the world strides into the 21st.

Another costly and unsuccessful modernization attempt (to add to the NAIA 3 debacle, the counting machines already referred to, the ZTE scandal, and many others that we can all name) would add significantly to the international perception of the Philippines as a “cannot do” country.

Ballot visibility

India is often cited as an example of a chaotic developing country that successfully computerized its polling system. However, as Abaya points out, Indian elections are party-based, allowing illiterate or semi-literate voters to follow the party symbol, rather than trying to find their candidate in a forest of names.

The Philippines has higher levels of literacy than India, but even so the huge number of names on the ballot (whether computerized or manual) must make life tough for the many semi-literate voters.

For an indication of how important the candidates themselves take visibility in the ballot, see the desperate campaign being waged by the Aquino campaign to keep Vetallano Acosta off the ballot (the point being that without Acosta on the ballot, Aquino would be the first name listed, which according to a University of Vermont study would increase his vote by 2.5%).

Will Erap’s name appear on the ballot?

“The Philippines seems like the sort of country where anyone can do anything” a friend said on hearing that Mae Paner, the pleasantly plump actress known as Juana Change, is featured in an exhibition of nude portraits (a performance described by Jim Paredes as “fearless … a must see”).

However, there is a downside to the disregard for rules in the Philippines, especially in the electoral season.

What has surprised me about Estrada’s declaration that he intends to run for reelection is not just that it is obviously unconstitutional and violates his pardon (which prohibits him from engaging in political activity), but that the response from Comelec seemed so spineless:

Speaking at a media briefing, [Comelec Chair] Melo said the Comelec could not stop Estrada from filing a certificate of candidacy. “We cannot say if he is qualified or not. There is no case against him. Right now, it seems that he is qualified because there is no protest against him,” he said.

Isn't this the sort of issue where one would look to the Commission on Elections to make a preliminary ruling, even if the issue will eventually be decided by the Supreme Court? This point was well made in a letter in the Inquirer this week:

Is the Commission on Elections not supposed to check the certificates of candidacy and see if the applicants are qualified? Are they not supposed to approve or disapprove it? What if nobody files a complaint? Then the application is deemed approved. Comelec Chair Melo said that “it seems that he [Estrada] is qualified because there is no protest against him.” It is the Comelec who should say if a candidate is qualified or not.

However, if the ultimate arbiter in this matter will have to be the Supreme Court, this will throw up huge practical difficulties, as pointed out in another letter to the Inquirer:

The point is the high court’s rulings in these parts generally take at least three months, from when an issue becomes justiciable. And that is ignoring the time for motions for review, etc, after the initial ruling has been issued. At the earliest, then, Erap’s case would become justiciable after Dec. 14, when the Comelec shall have received all the certificates of candidacy and is ready to order the printing of the ballots. I seriously doubt the ballot printing process is amenable, if necessary, to a re-run. At that juncture, then, I ask: “What kind of ballot must the Comelec order to be printed?” Is it one that includes or excludes Estrada among the presidential candidates? I assume that would somehow depend on the Comelec’s own position on Erap’s capacity or incapacity to run. And so, assuming it believes Erap is qualified, and thus has put his name on the ballot, will the votes cast for him be counted even if he may be eventually disqualified? On the other hand, if the Comelec is of the opinion that Erap cannot run and has thus excluded his name in the ballot, what happens if the Justices finally rule in his favor?

I would imagine that a likely scenario is that Erap’s name will appear on the ballot paper, but the Supreme Court will eventually rule that he is ineligible. In that case I am sure that millions of hard core Erap fans will vote for him anyway. If in the final result the number of spoiled ballots (i.e., votes for Erap) is close to the number of votes cast for Villar and Noynoy, or even exceeds them, then where will we be?