JUST 70km south of Manila lies the great Lake Taal, easily the equal of Sumatra’s Toba, so far from Jakarta. The mayor of one part of the shore is the only Muslim anywhere to be seen. He ran unopposed and is a successful businessman. His wife is a local Christian. Their son is a Muslim, the daughter a Christian. One of his predecessors during his mayoralty gained riches beyond riches, and was gunned down. The first is honest beyond reproach; about the second, the less said the better. I write from Villa Taal, my humble residence a good part of the time here on 150m of the same beach.
A famous speaker of the House of Representatives in America once said that “all politics is local”. It may also be said that local politics is a mirror of national politics and vice-versa. The president of the Philippines, son of the all but sainted Cory Aquino, and of the martyred Senator Benigno Aquino, is an honest man, from one of the great rich families of this archipelago. Since first becoming mayor of the Philippine business district, Makati, the vice-president — elected separately from the president — Jejomar Binay, has become rich beyond rich, and now as he runs for next year’s presidency, his son rules Makati and other children hold even higher office. Until now, Vice-President Binay has had an insuperable lead in the polls.
But British Prime Minister Harold Wilson once said, “A week is a long time in politics”. In recent months evidence of the vice-president’s corruption has piled up: zillions made as mayor far more as vice-president.
“It’s all ridiculous,” the vice-president has said, and most people assume that in the provinces everybody assumes that all Filipino politicians are corrupt and that Binay is at least a folksy guy who likes and helps people.
In the last few days, a good lady named Grace Poe, has whizzed up the ladder. Her late legal father — and immensely popular actor — was blatantly cheated of the presidency by the now incarcerated former leader Gloria Arroyo. “Hello Garci” is an illegal tape made of her telephone call to the elections commissioner, checking to make sure he had the extra million votes in reserve from a Mindanao district; where later, the governor sanctioned the murder of 31 travelling journalists, a government-issued bulldozer being amazingly enough at the actual site of the ambush. Such was the Arroyo era.
Karma reigns in the Philippines. The Marcos’ assassination of Aquino led to the presidency of his widow and his son. Now, the kleptomania and electoral fraud of Gloria Arroyo (daughter of a former president) is leading possibly to the election of the daughter of the late actor who surely won the 2004 election. It means that the accusation and visible evidence of the corruption of Binay is gaining traction.
The Philippines is a paradise not just for its magnificent beaches, like those of Boracay, but for political economists like your humble servant. In most of the rest of the world, politicians at least say that their motivation is the good of the people. It has the additional virtue of sometimes being true.
But in the Philippines, no one bothers to say any such thing. You don’t go into business here to make enough honest money to afford a life of service to your country. You go into politics to make enough money to buy businesses and enrich your family.
As it happens, the Philippines is lucky. International rating agencies have raised it from junk-bond levels to investment grade, a profound jump. It is now the second fastest growing economy in the world. Only in the 1990s has the Philippines done so well, when it had its only serious professional president to date, the hero-leader of the 1986 revolution, when the then general, Fidel V. Ramos, overthrew his cousin, dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Six years later, he became a 24 hour-a-day leader, starting with faxes to his cabinet at 5am. He enjoyed his “four eyes only” long meetings with Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, and promised to put aside the absurd Filipino obsession with Sabah, which enjoys about the same international traction of giving California back to the Spanish king. For the record, I must divulge that I am Ramos’s authorised biographer. Since World War 2, he has never thrown away a piece of paper with his writing or name on it, all of which I’ve perused. There is no smell of KKN, as I hope my book gives evidence.
Falling off a cliff is a lot quicker than climbing up a mountain. Ramos was followed by a drunken movie star, hugely popular with the masses for his films representing the guy who stops plunder by the rich against the poor. Surprise, he was thrown out of office for plunder, stealing from the poor to enrich his billionaire circle and family.
Meantime, the Philippines fell off the cliff financially. At least, president Gloria Arroyo understood macroeconomics, and instead of destroying the economy, she just took billion dollar cuts for herself and family, much like the late ex-president Suharto to your south.
If Vice-President Binay wins, the Philippines reverts to junk bond status. If Poe wins, it could be an incompetent presidency like Saintly Cory Aquino’s, which was saved only by General Ramos’ heroic put-down of nine attempted coups. But possibly Poe prefers, like Bismarck, to learn not from her own mistakes but from those of others. A lot is at stake in this archipelago of 100,000,000 souls.
The writer is emeritus professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, the United States