Not Yet Too Late for a Reflection!!!

It is again an exciting day at the senate.  But I don’t know if everyone shares such excitement.  I, for one, find every senate investigation boring.  And here we are again: a new witness in the name of Rodolfo Lozada, Jr., an Electronics and Communications Engineer, who is implicating Malacañang “in his abduction in an apparent cover-up bid to stop him from revealing kickbacks in the aborted $329-million broadband deal which official feared could cause President Macapagal-Arroyo’s downfall”(Philippine Daily Inquirer, Sat., February 9, 2008).

The big thing here, for me, is the downfall of Pres. Arroyo to the delight of the opposition and all those against her.  This is like a telenovela slowly unfolding its ending.  Filipinos are again fixing their eyes on their TV sets as if waiting for what is going to happen.  Filipinos love “teleserya”.  I am one of them, though every time I open my TV to watch the senate hearing on this ZTE case, I find it too amusing aside from being too boring.  The senators and all those invited to shed light on these allegations are seemingly to me a bunch of stupid people.  How many senate hearings we have on records?  How many instant celebrities for being star witnesses?  What was the result?  Where were the witnesses?  These investigations, though as the senators would call it “in aid of legislations,” are always tainted with political colors, not to mention the grandstanding grabbed for future political ambitions.

It is funny.  It is like a joke.  It is also silly.  But this is our country.  This is the landscape of Philippine politics.  Endless allegations.  Intrigues.  It is like listening to some showbiz reports.  That is why I sometimes enjoy it, for I tell you I love showbusiness.  But are we getting any serious here?  Is Lozada a credible one?  Do we have to take his words as gospel truths?  Who is Lozada?  We have heard him on TV.  We have seen him cry.  We have seen him how he was labeled by one of the Malacañang boys as “probinsyanong intsik”, or ganged up by GMA’s men as “crying lady.”  What makes him very important to this controversy?  Will his testimony cause GMA’s downfall?  The CBCP is hailing Lozada and the first whistleblower Joey de Venecian III for their courage (PDI, Mon., February 11, 2008).  Somehow the Catholic Church is instrumental to the senate appearance of Lozada since after the alleged abduction he went to La Salle for an advance press release of his statements.  Some nuns escorted him for protection.  Is this now a sign of another EDSA?  Who knows?

But the question now boils down on his credibility and the truthfulness of his testimony.  Some friends told me that he is credible since he cries on TV.  And he is quite sincere.  But the devil can cry too.  The latter can even summon a group of nuns to protect him.  Credibility here is very elusive.  Who is now telling the truth?  Senate hearings are always leaving us suspended.  Maybe JDV’s son is telling the truth, though Abalos and the First Gentleman have denied his testimony.  Will Lozada’s testimony corroborate Joey de Venecia’s?  We hope it will.  But the question remains: Are the two witnesses reliable?  These are hard questions indeed.  Only the outcome of this investigation will provide us the answers to our queries. 

But this paper does not settle on the questions above.  My task here is not to show Lozada’s credibility.  I don’t have also the intention to write more unkind remarks to the present senate investigation.  Regarding the kickbacks, I am not really surprised.  This investigation makes it appear irregular or abnormal.  But this is already normal to our politicians and government leaders.  Nothing new here.  This is the landscape of our corrupt political system (if ever we blame the system).  Or are we to blame the people in such a system? Or both.  As I have said I don’t have to go deeper into the drama of this investigation.

One observation will suffice as a reaction to our predicament.  This is regarding one news item: “Poor villager gave Lozada ‘guava lesson’” (PDI, Feb., 9, 2008).  The item goes, “The stark contrast between poor villagers concerned with how hungry birds would find food to eat and greedy politicians and officials drove star witness Rodolfo Lozada, Jr. to unbosom himself yesterday.”

However, this is not really new to us.  Maybe for those who are comfortably living in the imperial Manila and have not visited the provinces, this is a surprise.  There is indeed a big gap between the people in the urban areas and those in the rural.  I am not saying that those in the urban areas are all rich.  Just go to the slum vicinities of our cities.  There you see the urban poor.  But these people also came from the provinces.  They went to Manila to look for a better life only to live a more miserable existence.  F. Sionel Jose, our national artist for literature captures this image in an interesting poem from his novel My Brother, My Executioner.  Thus we quote here an excerpt of it.

This is the beginning-

We started here and followed them,

They who had their backs to us,

They who began here, too,

Who cut the trees and uprooted weeds.

We prepared that fallow earth

And planted the seed

And all that had to be done is done.

They will also begin here-

They whose faces are young still,

Whose deeds we cannot know.

Will they also end here

Like all of us, without meaning?

……..

On my knees in Quiapo till my kness ache

Lisping a prayer in Quiapo till my tongue numbs

I shall lacerate myself till I bleed

Because it is Friday-

On my knees in Quiapo, in the poisoned air,

Listening to hope that is not there.

……..

The shadow I cast is long;

My forehead is moist, my hand is cold.

I have gone to a field to glean

And now, my pillow is a rock

And night without stars

Surrounds me.

Even the trees are still

Shriveled in the air…

There is no dream.

(from Don Vicente, pp. 171-173)

These lines from Sionel’s poem entitled “Calvaria” explain our point here.  The Filipinos are getting poorer.  Hopelessly poor!   

Being a president of Philippine Forest Corp. (PFC), Lozada had witnessed some of our “impoverished areas.”  This is irreconcilable to him, since his job as a government consultant took him “to swanky hotels for meetings involving high-stake deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”

You go to our coffee shops, sip a cup of coffee that costs a hundred pesos, then just pause and think that there are million Filipinos who cannot even afford to buy a pack of noodles for their three meals.  The contrast really is very evident.  And what is worse: our politicians and many of our government leaders are living in luxury.  I am generalizing it for this is the bigger picture.  As Sionel Jose writes in another novel, “I should not be angered then, when men in the highest places, sworn to serve this country as public servants, end up as millionaires in Porbes Park, while using the people’s money in the name of beauty, the public good, and all those shallow shibboleths about discipline and nationalism that we have come to hear incessantly.  I should not shudder anymore in disgust or contempt when the most powerful people in the land use the public coffers for their foreign shopping trips or build ghastly fascist monuments in the name of culture or of the Filipino spirit” (“Tree,” from Don Vicente, p. 166)               

The contrast really is best shown in the case of Lozada.  Lozada narrates that during a visit to an upland community, there was a tree rich with guavas.  He asked a native there to harvest those guavas and sell them to earn money.  The reply of the native struck him.  The latter said, as Lozada recalls, “Sir, we leave them there.  Those are for the birds.”  This had touched Lozada.  As he puts it, “I was so touched because when I looked at him, he was not rich.  His slippers were old, his T-shirt was filled with holes, and yet he talks about caring for the birds.”

Do our leaders care for our little folks, the way the native in Lozada’s story care for the birds?  I am always saddened when our elected officials become rich through kickbacks and SOP’s.  Maybe they can argue that anyway the money did not come from the taxes that the people pay but from the contractors of every project.  But still it is overpriced.  And who will pay the debt if the money used for the project is loaned from foreign investors?  Or in road projects, toll fees become expensive since the government is paying a large debt.  Now the poor Filipino will endlessly suffer while the rich politicians and government appointed leaders are living comfortably, enjoying their vacations abroad.  Their children are studying in some exclusive schools, if not abroad, while the children of the poor majority are just being contented studying in the public schools devoid of necessary facilities, lacking in books and classrooms.  These schools don’t even have access to the Internet.  If they have computers donated by the government, then these are outdated.  But the mystery here I heard: each computer given by the congressmen costs P120, 000.

Our leaders are greedy, generally.  Instead of exemption, this has become the rule.  Once you are elected then you become rich.  No wonder during elections, many candidates are killing each other.  This is getting worse.  We thought that after the two EDSA revolutions, things would change.  But we put the same faces up there.  We are also to blame.  Our guilt will haunt us to the grave.  What would we tell the future generation – the children of our children?  What have we done?  I am glad Lozada and JDV III came out to expose these things.  But where will this investigation go?  If there will be another impeachment, will it prosper?  GMA still has the numbers.  And if she is impeached, who will replace her?  The opposition?  JDV and Erap are joining their forces now to oust GMA.  But who are these people?  Both of them are “trapos’ trapo.” 

Will there be an end to our suffering as a people?  We have a very beautiful country but ravaged by her own people.  We have a promising younger generation but already corrupted by the elder ones.  Look what happened during the SK elections.  Sometimes I feel that there is no hope in here.  My wish now is to leave this country and join our thousand fellow Filipinos who are working abroad.  The situation now leaves us without a choice.  Life is hard here.  We can always sacrifice, you may claim.  But why sacrifice here when the people whom I thought to be our leaders do not care?     

  

Indeed there is a contrast between the lives of our ordinary folks in the rural areas and the lives of our leaders living in Manila.  Living at Porbes Park.  It is sad to note that many of our government leaders are living a life of greed, no matter how Sec. Neri calls it “moderate greed.” This aborted NBN transaction is already an “unbridled greed and breath-taking rapacity of the personalities involved,” as the PDI editorial goes (Feb. 9, 2008).

This multimillion- dollar transaction is a scandal to us.  The millions of supposed to be kickbacks have shown the true colors of those involved in it.  But this is just one example.  10% to 20% SOP in every government transaction is common knowledge.  That is why are politicians are getting richer and richer everyday.  So much so that when they run for public offices they can afford to spend a lot of money for they know that when they are there, they can get back the money.  Or better yet, they can protect their business interests.  There is money in politics.  As the CBCP observes, “the exposés made by electronic expert Rodolfo Noel Lozada, Jr. and businessman Jose “Joey” de Venecia III on alleged kickbacks in the $329-million National Broadband Network (NBN) project may have saved the country from the grip of scandalous deals and ‘personal and family interests’” (PDI, Feb. 11, 2008).

Personal and family interests.  This is very common to our leaders.  I don’t know when can a lightning strike them.  But we also have to blame ourselves.  “We are poor,” as F. Sionel Jose opines, “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” (“Why are Filipinos so Poor?,” a speech delivered in Manila, Philippines).  Look at what happened to Erap.

Lozada at first never wanted to be at the senate hearing since he was afraid that he could tell the truth there at the expense of his friends.  See, this is what Sionel meant by his words above.  We just condone the corrupt because they are our friends.  It is good that Lozada has changed his heart. 

It is now time for us to act as a people.  The future lies in our hands.  But again we are weak.  As Sionel puts it, “I would like to see all this as a big joke that is being played upon us, but I have seen what was wrought in the past – the men who were destroyed being lifted from the dung heap of poverty, without recourse to justice.  But like my father, I have not done anything.  I could not, because I am me, because I died long ago” (“Tree,” from Don Vicente, p. 166).

Have we done anything?  Our situation now is not a “big joke.”  Our country is not O.K.  A cancer is slowly killing us.

These thoughts are disturbing me for sometime now.  I better grab this opportunity than allowing them to just slip away from me.  My feeling is that our country the Philippines is at the crossroad to make a crucial decision to begin somewhere.  More than twenty years have already elapsed since the first EDSA revolution, yet here we are groping still in the dark.  It has been a pathless, directionless journey for us as a country. There has been no real and reliable compass to reach the port of our destination.

           

What I am trying to say here is the need to question the status quo of our country.  The present system requires a thorough evaluation.  Failure to do so will bring us great catastrophes in the next five to seven years (one example here: exodus of fellow Filipinos – a fateful waste of our human resources).  As a part of this country, so far, I have not acted with great fortitude and courage.  I have not learned from the reformers of the past who did not compromise as I have done.  Our national artist F. Sionel Jose has captured my predicament by saying: “So here I am on the fringes and yet very much a part of this rotten structure I want to destroy, chained as I am to it by comfort and human frailty” (The Samsons, p.545)

           

As a country, I am convinced that there is a need to begin somewhere.  I ask: where will our leaders bring us for the next five to seven years?  They are duty-bound to lead us, to be our compass, our guide.  But are they leading us?  To where?  Our system has fallen short of this expectation.  Hence the logical conclusion is to change it.  For are we not dreaming of a country that can rightly be called “democratic” – a land of promise and of equal opportunities.  Are we not dreaming of a country where poverty is already a thing of the past?  Are we not dreaming of a country where our elected leaders are serving us even to the point of giving their lives for us, like the heroes of old?  

This has bothered me deeply.  I have nothing personal against our leaders.  What I have here is just an objective criticism.  What I ask is that, we, the Filipino people, should never be deprived of our right as a people – a right to a better life, to freedom and to prosperity.

We live in a democracy.  We have so many laws and yet our leaders are the number one violators of these laws at the expense of our poor.  

And yet, as a people, we have all been part of the system.  By our action or inaction, we have all been part of this anomaly.  And worse, we have taken advantage of the system, for in one way or another we have benefited from it.  Others say we just wait when we have a new president.  But why do we have to wait when we believe in the righteousness of our cause?  Time is already ripe for development.  The future of our country depends on our determination to pursue this advocacy.  We cannot just turn our eyes away and cover our ears.  Someone has to play the “bad guy” to start the engine of change.  Someone has to turn the ignition.  I appeal to your sense of love for our country in saying that we must do something now.  We need to begin somewhere.

Therefore, there are two things I propose here: (1) we must educate our people by showing them good governance and good politics, and (2) we must opt for a moral revolution.  Revolution is not yet arm struggle.  Instead of running to the street, how about creating some initiatives that can truly help our people.  And yet, this should be a collective act.  We do it together.  One cannot do it alone.  My consolation is that there are already pockets of hope in our country.  Various initiatives from livelihood programs to education are going on elsewhere in our country.  In Pampanga, Gov. Panlilio, the priest turned governor, has been doing very well despite the opposition of the mayors who don’t want to change.  The latter are still a product of what we commonly call “patronage politics.”  

I maintain here that violence is not our means.  I don’t like the method of Trillanes and company.  A bloody revolution can only be our last recourse.    Without a drastic change of mentality, of paradigm, I am afraid that one can no longer find meaning and direction in this country.  It is either one would leave this country or stay here in utter hopelessness.  As Erich Fromm puts it in his book Escape From Freedom: “Unless he belonged somewhere, unless his life had some meaning and direction, he would feel like a particle of dust and be overcome by his individual insignificance.  He would not be able to relate himself to any system which would give meaning and direction to his life, he would be filled with doubt, and this doubt eventually would paralyze his ability to act – that is, to live.”  To continue living here as a Filipino!  Hence there is an intense need to begin somewhere.  Somehow we need to take a stand and make a choice, even a difficult one, or else we live a lie inside ourselves for the rest of our lives.

 

- jose conrado a. estafia