Country Profile: The Philippines
By IRIS C. GONZALES
INSIDE the Bronx-like district of Tondo in Manila, the
Philippine capital, one will see a densely populated labyrinthine community of
makeshift dwellings, licked by the trash-filled waters of the famed Manila Bay.
It is home to the city’s poorest of the poor.
Deeper into the interior, surrounded by this sea of shanty
homes is the heavily -guarded seaport empire of Filipino billionaire Enrique
Razon, who runs 27 ports around the world – from Manila to Madagascar.
Tons of cargo – From Feta Cheese to iPads – change hands at
Razon’s port everyday as the slum dwellers around it beg for food in Manila’s
streets or eke out a living doing odd jobs.
The contrast is stark and telling and is seen in the rest of
the country. Decades after a bloodless revolution toppled the late
strongman Ferdinand Marcos and restored democracy in 1986, the Philippines
remains home to only a few filthy rich families, with the rest still among
Asia’s poorest.
These families have been controlling big businesses in the
country, from retail malls, beach resorts and toll ways to a new and glittering
100-hectare Las Vegas-style gambling city.
From the airport to the nearby Roxas Boulevard, for
instance, one will find homeless families sleeping on the cold pavement or
children selling sweet smelling Sampaguita garlands to sleek four-wheel drive
SUVs plying the road, lined with five star hotels and high-rise condominiums.
President Benigno Aquino III, the only son of the late
Corazon Aquino who became president when democracy was restored in 1986, is
trying to change that, boosting economic growth and trumpeting an
anti-corruption platform with the aim of uplifting the poor.
After putting Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the ailing former
president, on hospital arrest on corruption charges, Aquino is now building
cases of plunder against opposition lawmakers who allegedly received
commissions for ghost infrastructure projects.
More than three years since he took office, however,
economic growth, although increasing – 7.2 percent in 2013 from 6.8 percent the
previous year – is not trickling down to the 25 million people living below
poverty line.
The administration has failed to create local industries
that are heavy enough to significantly boost the economy, relying instead on
the call center business, which is booming in this English-speaking
country.
Everyday, some 5,000 Filipinos still leave Manila to work
mostly in the United States, Hong Kong and the Middle East as domestic helpers,
entertainers, caregivers or seafarers, because there are not enough gainful
opportunities in the country.
And while Aquino enjoys high popularity ratings, he has yet
to fulfill many of his campaign promises such as addressing the problem of
extrajudicial killings of journalists and human rights workers.
One of the most awaited promises yet to be fulfilled is the
distribution of his family’s 4,000-hectare sugar plantation in the northern
part of the country as mandated by an agrarian reform law. It is the same
promise his mother made 28 years ago as president.
He also promised to build infrastructure – new roads, trains
and airports – with the help of businessmen to decongest traffic in Metro
Manila and at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, the main gateway named
after his father, which has been consistently dubbed by travelers as the
world’s worst airport.
Motorists are waiting for such promises as they brave the
daily three to six hour traffic jams along EDSA, the main thoroughfare that
stretches 23.8 kilometers through six cities while commuters endure the
impossibly congested elevated metro train that traverses the same route.
The monstrous traffic jams daily have put the Philippines in
novelist Dan Brown’s fiction Inferno, which described Manila as the gates of
hell and one with apocalyptic poverty.
Indeed, Manila is a place where truth reads like fiction;
where the surreal meets the mundane and where a handful of Filipino
billionaires make it to the Forbes list every year, while the poor stay
desperately poor.
