Why are Filipinos so Poor?
In the ’50s and ’60s, the Philippines was the most envied country in Southeast Asia. What happened?
By F. Sionil Jose
What did South Korea look like after the Korean War in 1953?
Battered, poor - but look at Korea now. In the Fifties, the traffic in
Taipei was composed of bicycles and army trucks, the streets flanked by
tile-roofed low buildings. Jakarta was a giant village and Kuala Lumpur
a small village surrounded by jungle and rubber plantations. Bangkok
was criss-crossed with canals, the tallest structure was the Wat Arun,
the Temple of the Sun, and it dominated the city’s skyline. Ricefields
all the way from Don Muang airport — then a huddle of galvanized
iron-roofed bodegas, to the Victory monument.Visit these cities today
and weep — for they are more beautiful, cleaner and prosperous than
Manila. In the Fifties and Sixties we were the most envied country in
Southeast Asia. Remember further that when Indonesia got its
independence in 1949, it had only 114 university graduates compared
with the hundreds of Ph.D.’s that were already in our universities. Why
then were we left behind? The economic explanation is simple. We did
not produce cheaper and better products.
The basic question really is why we did not modernize fast enough
and thereby doomed our people to poverty. This is the harsh truth about
us today. Just consider these: some 15 years ago a survey showed that
half of all grade school pupils dropped out after grade 5 because they
had no money to continue schooling.Thousands of young adults today are
therefore unable to find jobs. Our natural resources have been ravaged
and they are not renewable. Our tremendous population increase eats up
all of our economic gains. There is hunger in this country now; our
poorest eat only once a day.But this physical poverty is really not as
serious as the greater poverty that afflicts us and this is the poverty
of the spirit.
Why then are we poor? More than ten years ago, James Fallows, editor
of the Atlantic Monthly, came to the Philippines and wrote about our
damaged culture which, he asserted, impeded our development. Many
disagreed with him but I do find a great deal of truth in his
analysis.This is not to say that I blame our social and moral malaise
on colonialism alone. But we did inherit from Spain a social system and
an elite that, on purpose, exploited the masses. Then, too, in the
Iberian peninsula, to work with one’s hands is frowned upon and we
inherited that vice as well. Colonialism by foreigners may no longer be
what it was, but we are now a colony of our own elite.
We are poor because we are poor — this is not a tautology. The
culture of poverty is self-perpetuating. We are poor because our people
are lazy. I pass by a slum area every morning - dozens of adults do
nothing but idle, gossip and drink. We do not save. Look at the
Japanese and how they save in spite of the fact that the interest given
them by their banks is so little. They work very hard too.
We are great show-offs. Look at our women, how overdressed,
over-coiffed they are, and Imelda epitomizes that extravagance. Look at
our men, their manicured nails, their personal jewelry, their diamond
rings. Yabang - that is what we are, and all that money expended on
status symbols, on yabang. How much better if it were channeled into
production.
We are poor because our nationalism is inward looking. Under its
guise we protect inefficient industries and monopolies. We did not
pursue agrarian reform like Japan and Taiwan. It is not so much the
development of the rural sector, making it productive and a good market
as well. Agrarian reform releases the energies of the landlords who,
before the reform, merely waited for the harvest. They become
entrepreneurs, the harbingers of change.
Our nationalist icons like Claro M. Recto and Lorenzo Tanada opposed
agrarian reform, the single most important factor that would have
altered the rural areas and lifted the peasant from poverty. Both of
them were merely anti-American.
And finally, we are poor because we have lost our ethical moorings.
We condone cronyism and corruption and we don’t ostracize or punish the
crooks in our midst. Both cronyism and corruption are wasteful but we
allow their practice because our loyalty is to family or friend, not to
the larger good.
We can tackle our poverty in two very distinct ways. The first
choice: a nationalist revolution, a continuation of the revolution in
1896. But even before we can use violence to change inequities in our
society, we must first have a profound change in our way of thinking,
in our culture. My regret about EDSA is that change would have been
possible then with a minimum of bloodshed. In fact, a revolution may
not be bloody at all if something like EDSA would present itself again.
Or a dictator unlike Marcos.
The second is through education, perhaps a longer and more complex
process. The only problem is that it may take so long and by the time
conditions have changed, we may be back where we were, caught up with
this tremendous population explosion which the Catholic Church
exacerbates in its conformity with doctrinal purity.We are faced with a
growing compulsion to violence, but even if the communists won, they
will rule as badly because they will be hostage to the same
obstructions in our culture, the barkada, the vaulting egos that
sundered the revolution in 1896, the Huk revolt in 1949-53.
To repeat, neither education nor revolution can succeed if we do not
internalize new attitudes, new ways of thinking. Let us go back to
basics and remember those American slogans: A Ford in every garage. A
chicken in every pot. Money is like fertilizer: to do any good it must
be spread around.Some Filipinos, taunted wherever they are, are shamed
to admit they are Filipinos. I have, myself, been embarrassed to
explain, for instance, why Imelda, her children and the Marcos cronies
are back, and in positions of power. Are there redeeming features in
our country that we can be proud of? Of course, lots of them. When
people say, for instance, that our corruption will never be banished,
just remember that Arsenio Lacson as mayor of Manila and Ramon
Magsaysay as president brought a clean government.We do not have the
classical arts that brought Hinduism and Buddhism to continental and
archipelagic Southeast Asia, but our artists have now ranged the world,
showing what we have done with Western art forms, enriched with our own
ethnic traditions. Our professionals, not just our domestics, are all
over, showing how accomplished a people we are!
Look at our history. We are the first in Asia to rise against
Western colonialism, the first to establish a republic. Recall the
Battle of Tirad Pass and glory in the heroism of Gregorio del Pilar and
the 48 Filipinos who died but stopped the Texas Rangers from capturing
the president of that First Republic. Its equivalent in ancient history
is the Battle of Thermopylae where the Spartans and their king
Leonidas, died to a man, defending the pass against the invading
Persians. Rizal — what nation on earth has produced a man like him? At
35, he was a novelist, a poet, an anthropologist, a sculptor, a medical
doctor, a teacher and martyr.We are now 80 million and in another two
decades we will pass the 100 million mark.
Eighty million — that is a mass market in any language, a mass
market that should absorb our increased production in goods and
services - a mass market which any entrepreneur can hope to exploit,
like the proverbial oil for the lamps of China.
Japan was only 70 million when it had confidence enough and the
wherewithal to challenge the United States and almost won. It is the
same confidence that enabled Japan to flourish from the rubble of
defeat in World War II.
I am not looking for a foreign power for us to challenge. But we have a
real and insidious enemy that we must vanquish, and this enemy is worse
than the intransigence of any foreign power. We are our own enemy. And
we must have the courage, the will, to change ourselves.
