Firefighting has become our normal

. . . Because we can’t seem to stay above water?

After Ondoy we now have another fire to fight: rehabilitation. And overarching them is Noynoy and the other presidential wannabes. And of course, given our state of affairs, the next president will tell us that he or she would have to fight another fire.

Staying above water reminds the writer of “Smokey Mountain”. What could he and his company do to help these people stay above water? A priest came with a practical idea: “How about appointing a group (e.g., a cooperative) to distribute your products in the community?” And the venture got started – a livelihood project.

Today many “Smokey Mountain”-like communities have mushroomed – but the model remains. It’s a stop-gap measure . . . that is not equal to the task! Who then is equal to the task among the presidential wannabes? Four years from now who can say “we’re better off today than 4 years ago”?

We have teed-up the initiative to rehabilitate post Ondoy, which is great. But we have a far larger destruction to address: we need to come to terms with how far down the economic abyss we are. By any contemporary global yardsticks we are doing poorly or why close to 30 million Filipinos are hungry.

If we’re content with stop-gap measures, it’s conceivable that our economy would come unglued. Why? We don’t have the infrastructure (capital, market, technology, talent) to create a robust, sustainable and developed economy – we’re already witnessing our downward spiral? Infrastructure starts in the mind, goes beyond the physical . . . and just like in computing, the software is as important. (But this seems too far removed from our consciousness – because we have been busy fire-fighting over the last 60-odd years and have become so jaded? “Pinoy kasi” won’t cut it!)

To push the computing analogy, Windows/Office and integrated, enterprise-wide systems have become the lifeblood of IT. Our effort to rehabilitate following Ondoy is akin to downloading “Excel” but not the rest of Office. We should be rehabilitating our economic infrastructure in the first place.

We’ve become an OFW-centric economy and thus developed a penchant for thinking small – or what they call Dutch Disease in the West. Now that we’ve realized the economy’s inadequacies, we’ve resorted to slicing the salami, e.g., that this initiative or that industry would keep us above water? But benchmarking ideas must be against best practice, e.g., when has Argentina been best practice in generating capital, something we sorely need? Will their model or one bright industry cut the 175 years to achieve developed-country status? We have been reduced to clutching at straws? A structural challenge demands more than spinning wheels and ideology – or why the world has left us behind! Unfortunately, countries and governments are averse to restructuring – and so deeper into the abyss we sink?

In an earlier article the writer talked about clarity of purpose – it’s not an American invention, but some would explain as inherent in their Protestant work ethic. The Americans are a Bible-reading lot. And just like us they read that Christ has set the example via His Two Great Commandments. KISS – was what He wanted to say? In any case, He chided the Pharisees not to focus on the form, i.e., the 300 tenets they had to live by, but on the substance of their faith.

Are we likewise, beyond our “kuro-kuro”, bogged down by so much irrelevance given our focus on personality-politics, and form-religion? Our focus should be on the people’s well-being – the 27 or 30 million hungry Filipinos? How do we “lift all boats”, our economy?