It was during the years of the Vietnam War when many students like myself began participating in political activism on campus and beyond. We protested the Philippine government’s plan to send Filipino troupes to fight there to comply with US claims that it was also an Asian war against communism.
Vietnam had successfully liberated itself in 1954 from French colonial control (after WWII occupation by Japan), and then was battered for another 20 years by US bombs, landmines, napalm bombs, and Agent Orange.
Estimates of Vietnamese killed, along with spill-over deaths in neighboring countries reach three million.
After the end of the war in 1975, Vietnam faced severe problems of landmine risks, chemical pollution of the soil and ecosystems, defoliation, heavy damage to towns and cities.
Worse, birth defects and severe health effects were suffered by millions of Vietnamese, and even manifest to this day.
And all this while we were sitting pretty in this country with nary a serious threat.
So the big question is: In spite of those punishing decades, how has Vietnam managed to do so well economically, in 2024 overtaking the Philippines’ per capita GDP, and over the past 20 years, attaining 1.7 times GDP faster growth than the global average?
Further, they seem to have become a country favored by major international investors.
To South Korea: During an international 1995 UNESCO meeting in Seoul hosted by the Korean Women’s Development Agency, older Korean women officials said to us, two Filipina participants, that they remembered how the Philippines had been a model for them in the decades after WWII.
Well, they have left us very far behind, having become a global economic powerhouse.
By many metrics, we are being left behind, for example, income inequality and poverty levels are lower in Malaysia, and we are still the 5th poorest country in Asean.
Compared to Thailand’s agricultural diversity and productivity, our agricultural sector has traditionally been neglected, and poorly performing.
Teen pregnancies, with all their dire economic and educational implications, are still highest in the Philippines.
Our ranking in the Programme for International Student Assessment on education is a national embarrassment, along with the recent data from the Philippine Statistics Authority of 18 million functionally-illiterate high school graduates: a portent for future poor development outcomes.
While all countries in Southeast Asia face problems, we seem merely to have gotten used to lagging behind.
Not being an economist or political analyst, my intuition nevertheless tells me that poor political leadership is at fault. Leadership at the top (Ferdinand Marcos’ years of systematic plunder, Duterte weakening institutions), and presidents past and present favoring elite capitalism, but also provincial leadership that treat provinces as profitable fiefdoms, going for choosing funding mal-development schemes that leave the majority of their populations in continuing economic and social distress. Leaving the country for overseas work is too often their only option.
The consensus seems to be that a widespread culture of corruption drains resources sorely needed for effective governance, true, but again, my intuition tells me that something else is, and has been at play for a very long time: political players’ sheer incompetence for the serious job of governance.
And now elections are once more upon us. What candidates are out there who are truly qualified, credible, principled?
Voters would need to do the work of finding out, of long-term attention to political developments, of making democratic and moral principles a basis for choice.
Not an easy task because for one thing, our dismal educational system hasn’t helped to develop tools of judgement, and for another, poverty disempowers, and leads to fear of the powerful or misplaced loyalty to them.
I have my biases: against candidates who, anytime in the past, were in any branch of entertainment, or who were ever credibly implicated in corruption or criminal cases, or who were part of the Duterte administration, or with multiple family members running for office, or who spend inordinate campaign sums, who hire entertainers for their campaigns, or who knowingly violated the fair election laws.
Getting my vote will be the precious few with relevant professional qualifications and/or proven track record of effective work and ethical behavior.
Elections reveal so much of who we are as a people. I wonder in what light we’ll see ourselves after May 12.
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Author’s email: h.cecilia7@gmail.com
