Friday, June 11, 2004
Fundamentals
Conrado de Quiros (PDI, http://www.inq7.net/opi/2004/mar/11/opi_csdequiros-1.htm)
I SAW my favorite economist and bishop, Sixto Roxas and Julio Labayen, last week at Club Filipino. They are part of a group that's looking at solutions to the problems of this country beyond the elections. They are not particularly gripped by the elections. None of the candidates, they say, is addressing the country's real problems. Not even Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo whose vaunted doctorate in economics is either little in evidence or gets in the way of development. Roxas should know, he served her father in the early 1960s as economic adviser.
Roxas has a model for a community-based development, rigorously conceived and prescribing the steps to accomplish it. It is the only kind of development there is, he says. The other kind, the entrepreneur-based one which subsumes everything to the reckoning of the individual capitalist, is not development--except for the companies that profit immensely from it often at the equally immense expense of the community--it is despoliation. You know there's something wrong, he says, when the GNP is deemed to increase each time a community gets devastated by a storm or an earthquake because of the sudden frenetic activity in the area, characterized by the flow of goods and emergency employment. A loss in real life becomes a gain on paper.
Enough of this business of luring foreign investments and restoring (foreign) investor confidence, Roxas would say after the presentation. No country in history has yet developed through foreign investments, not anywhere, not in the past, not in the present. All the developed countries today have developed from native ingenuity and boldness, not from the kindness of strangers. Foreign investments do not blaze trails, they go only to places that have already been blazed, that show a track record for success. Foreign investments merely supplement, like vitamins, they do not sustain, like food.
But the crucial difference in Roxas' model, as Bishop Labayen pointed out in his reaction, is not just that it redefines development from the perspective of the community rather than the investors, it redefines development as the handiwork of people rather than of capital. It sees the people as the makers of development. It transforms them from mere labor, to be hired as needed, to entrepreneurs, to create as is their birthright. It makes entrepreneurship a collective rather than an individual initiative, one that benefits the community in general in wellbeing rather than the investor in particular in profit. It transforms people from targets, beneficiaries and objects of development to subjects, initiators and authors of development. Targets of development do not develop, authors of development do.
It's a good reminder of the real fundamentals, the ones that are never found in the mythical "fundamentals" that business likes to bandy about when talking about progress. The real fundamentals are that countries do not develop from the benevolence or enlightened greed of others but from pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. The real fundamentals are that individual investors do not create development, a community does. The real fundamentals are that a country's greatest wealth does not lie in its land, or capital, or natural resources, it lies in its people.
Though the last is often quoted (truly the devil himself may quote Scripture to suit his purposes), it is seldom, if ever, practiced. It is more honored in the breach than in the fulfillment. Certainly, the elections overlook it completely: the battle cry among the candidates is restoring investor confidence, not restoring the people's confidence. Yet this country's fundamental problem, as shown dramatically by Elmer Jacinto, is the opposite. There and then you see why people are leaving this country the way they do. Why stay in a country that doesn't believe in you, that doesn't appreciate you, that doesn't even see you? Targets of development do not stay in their country, authors of development do.
The elections merely reflect our overriding obsession with foreign investments, export enclaves and globalization as the source of our salvation. I've always been amazed each time I hear English prescribed as the national language, or at least as the medium of instruction in schools, because that is presumably the only way we can communicate with tourists, multinational executives, and potential employers abroad. It distorts the whole concept of language altogether. A language is not something a people need to communicate with others, it is something they need to communicate with themselves. It is what government needs to communicate to its constituents, it is what the citizens need to communicate to their leaders. There and then, too, you see why this country is unable to unite. We are preoccupied with learning how to talk to others, we do not care to learn how to talk to ourselves.
The wisdom of a community-based and people-centered development is not unproven. That was what allowed the activists and revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s to organize the grass roots and unleash their creative energies. The so-called liberated areas were far from being no-man's land that Marcos' troopers could not enter, these were areas where the masses produced and created and governed themselves. Until their leaders stopped being revolutionary and started claiming, like religious clergy, they alone could infallibly interpret the people's will, punishing disbelievers with physical excommunication in the "killing fields." Which sapped the creativity , initiative and entrepreneurship of the governed.
The beginning and the end of development is one thing only: the people. You can't get any more fundamental than that.
