The Philippines: Islands Lost in Time

It is always reassuring to be back in the Philippines. To return to China is to be more than a little nostalgic at how it has changed. To return to Vietnam is to see all the cyclos gone and new scooters everywhere. But to go back to the Philippines is mostly to see everything the same as it was. Just a little seedier.

Why can’t the Philippines develop at the pace everywhere else in East, Southeast, and now even South Asia seems to? They even started ahead—in 1960 they were wealthier than Korea or Taiwan. They also have the obvious advantages of a large English-speaking population, perfect for call centres, and an American-modelled system that should be comfortable for US investors. They even seem to have a good education system, relatively speaking. Why isn’t the investment pouring in?

Indeed, it’s downright embarrassing, for Americans, that their piece of Asia stands out only for standing still.

An American friend argues that it is the Americans’ fault: they left the unfortunate Philippines not with the American system so much as with the New Deal and its tendency to bureaucracy. And bureaucracy in the Philippines is stifling.

But that doesn’t really explain it, to my mind. For one thing, bureaucracy has not stifled America itself in the years since 1945—even though it has actually grown since then, in America.

Nor is bureaucracy really likely to be a heavier burden in the PR than in pseudo-communist countries like China and Vietnam.

And much bureaucracy is made necessary by corruption. When documents are commonly forged, for example, it is that much more necessary to ask for additional forms of ID. When bribes are commonly paid, it makes sense to have two screenings instead of one.

The Filipinos themselves, to their credit, do not put the blame on their colonial experience. Nor does it seem fair. After all, they have been on their own since 1945. If Germany and Japan could rebuild, in the same period, from the rubble of lost war into world leadership, and Eastern Europe be already pulling out of the trauma of Soviet dominance up to 1989, there is little solace there for the Philippines.

My American friend also, frankly, blames Filipino laziness. A Thai with some Philippines experience does too. He insists the Philippines will never develop as quickly as Thailand because the Filipinos are just plain lazy by comparison.

It is not politically correct to say such things. But we must, in honesty, admit that there are national characteristics, and that laziness may be one of them. And observing Filipinos at home does leave me with this strong impression. One evening, I had supper in the hotel restaurant. When I wanted to pay the bill, all the waiters had disappeared. When one finally returned, and I offered her a bill requiring change, she would not get it for me. Instead, she waved me to the cashier to get it myself. Despite the fact that I was offering her a tip. (And despite the fact that she delivered my meal with no silverware.)

A couple of days earlier, I ordered an iced café latte in a Starbucks in Manila. When the order came, it was a hot café latte. When I brought it to the server and pointed this out, as politely as I could, she handed me a paper cup full of ice.

Another time, I walked into an empty restaurant for supper. I counted three waitresses and one waiter visible at the counter. It took me twenty minutes to catch someone’s eye and place an order. And that required raising my voice.

In Camiguin, a beautiful volcanic island which has become a tourist haven, our vacation was cut short by lack of funds. It is not that we didn’t have the money in the bank; it is that none of the banks on the island have an ATM hooked up to the international networks, and none will accept travellers’ checks. They apparently just cannot be bothered with the business.

This is not a case of a shortage of work: it is a shortage of people wanting to work. When you go out on errands in the morning, you never know what percentage you will be able to complete; because some shopkeepers will always have decided to take a spontaneous holiday. Government workers abandon their posts for days if there seems to be something better to do.

Mind, Filipinos abroad seem to work quite hard. (And if it is not prejudice to note this, why is it prejudice to note the opposite of those who stay home?)

When I pointed this out to my American friend, he suggested that this was because anyone who really wanted to work left the country.

The left traditionally blames the problem on the lack of land reform. They suppose that, if larger land holdings were seized by the government and doled out to the poor, all would be well.

Why not? It worked in Zimbabwe.

Or not.

It is hard to see how this would help the Philippine economy. In the first place, land is almost irrelevant to wealth in the post-industrial world. An influx of landless labour to the cities is just as likely—or more—to cause a boom in manufacturing or service industries. And in the second place, efficiencies probably argue, in the PR as in Canada, for farms to be larger, not smaller. Breaking up bigger farming operations is liable to slow the agricultural sector, so long as it is already in private hands. Indeed, when I asked a local agriculture department rep why the Philippines did not grow rubber (or cinnamon, or tea, or nutmeg…), a hugely profitable crop in Vietnam, she explained that it requires a large plantation, and these were rare in the Philippines. It is a nation of subsistence farmers.

The Filipinos themselves blame corruption. A taxi driver this morning claimed international studies reckon the Philippines the second most corrupt nation on earth.

This makes sense too of the apparent lack of initiative: corruption saps the drive to do anything, because results are not related to effort expended.

Partly, I suspect that “corruption” is a convenient alibi for many Filipinos. It is indeed grossly corrupt—fourteenth most corrupt country in the World, according to Transparency International, though, not second most corrupt. The tendency to exaggerate this might suggest a too-great willingness to believe it. If you don’t want to work hard in the first place, convincing yourself that there’s no advantage to doing so anyway helps salve the conscience.

And after all, if this is the problem, and everyone knows it is the problem, how did it happen? After all, the Philippines are a functioning democracy, and have been, except in the Marcos era, for some time. Why can’t the voters fix the problem by voting the rascals out?

Oddly, because the voters themselves seem to vote for corruption. My Filipina wife explains how the candidate who pays most for votes always wins in her home town. Now, I can understand poor people being prepared to promise their vote in exchange for money. But I can’t see why they would then vote the way they said, in the privacy of the booth. In the Philippines, a bought vote stays bought, as a matter of honour.

Filipinos can also, it seems, be counted on to vote for the scion of the local “big family”; it almost goes without saying that the senator from Camiguin province will have the last name Romualdo, while the senator from Agusan del Norte will be named Plaza. Surely, if either the corruption of the current elite or the concentration of land in too few hands were a genuine concern among the people, this would not happen.

Instead, the Philippines seems to be a genuine elective aristocracy. The people consider themselves tied to their feudal lords by mutual bonds: they owe the lord allegiance, and the lord, in turn, is supposed to look after them. That is, these days, to regularly give them money in one form or another. It does not seem to register that it is their own money.

An aristocracy, however, as opposed to a good old-fashioned bourgeois democracy, is a system that promotes idleness, not business. On the one hand, idleness is a trait of the upper classes, and is admired as such. It would be a scandal among these classes, as with the British upper class a century ago, to soil those hands with “trade.” A gentleman does not work for a living.

One sees traces of the same attitude in Filipinos all the time. Nothing is so important to the Filipina as to have pale skin, probably because this implies having avoided any hard outdoor labour. My wife was deeply impressed, when she shook Imelda Marcos’s hand, at the softness of her skin. Though young and fit, she also insists when home on riding everywhere in a tricycle, where I would walk as a matter of course.

To work hard, accordingly, is rather in bad taste. Better to win a lottery, or bet on a cockfight, or pan for gold, or marry a rich foreigner. At worst, perhaps better even to con, or pick pockets, or walk the streets for trade.

Every Filipino kid knows three words of English: “give me money!”

And, if one gets money, one immediately incurs certain obligations. One has a perceived moral obligation, as do the big families, to hand it around generously to relatives and neighbours—or failing this, to let them take it. This is difficult, if one does not hold a position allowing access to tax money, and acts in turn as a strong disincentive to actually acquiring anything. You’ll only end up losing it, or all your friends.

If one must come up with one word for this attitude, I guess “laziness” might do. But it is really a far more complex set of social expectations. Whatever word you use, it is an obvious impediment to material development.

Given all this, sending foreign aid to the Philippines is probably just a waste of money. So, perhaps, is investing in the Philippines. Accepting Filipino immigrants and guest workers may be something we can do: letting those who want to work do so.

And there may be something to the Filipino system, after all. Those who want to work, as my American friend observed, can leave. Historically, they always have. The Filipinos are seafarers; for centuries they have formed a good proportion of the world’s ships’ crews. Today, they account for about one fifth worldwide.

As long as working abroad is possible, from their point of view, why not preserve this part of the world, so beautiful and so tropical and so easy to live in, as a vacation or shore leave or retirement paradise? Why not keep it as they remember it? Let it develop, and it would only be more expensive to retire to.

Then where would they be?