“I wrote some months
ago about my own experience of a delayed flight to Cebu because of
NAIA’s runway congestion . . . Secretary Mar Roxas said that the
commercial airlines operating in NAIA have doubled to 119 compared to
only 62 in 2008,” adds former senator Atty. Rene Espina,
Manila Bulletin, May 13, 2012. “.
. . [W]e are dragging our feet, reports
Business Mirror, 2nd May 2012.
The upgrading of airport facilities, a project targeted for
completion February 2007 is now moved to June 2013”!
Those
news reports are a microcosm of our reality – and it isn’t
promising given we’ve already lost this generation to
underdevelopment. It is very similar to what the writer saw when he
first arrived in Eastern Europe. And we have already seen how country
after country in the region has gone ahead of us – “que
sera, sera”?
The only difference is today President Aquino is personally leading
the fight against corruption, but for the rest of us it’s business
as usual – while rationalizing the inefficiencies and incompetence
in our midst? As the writer’s Eastern European friends have
realized: “We
can’t get to our destination no matter how much we want to if we
are driving a car with a punctured gas tank”! And
that is exactly what we are doing with “a
little inefficiency here”
and “a
little incompetence there.”
The free market is a highly competitive arena and competition can
come from anywhere. To say we were blindsided doesn’t change the
outcome, if it is one of failure. Throwing efforts against problems
incessantly doesn’t mean we are being efficient and competent. For
decades we’ve been caught in the “activity trap” – going
round in circles – and that is exactly how and why undertakings
fail!
Well
traveled as we are, it is not lost to Pinoys that the one thing that
generally differentiates a developed from an underdeveloped economy
is infrastructure. And the writer’s Eastern European friends have
realized why before they were formally accepted into the EU, the EU
committed on upgrading their country’s infrastructure.
It
is no different from how the US developed after WWII following
Eisenhower’s efforts to build the US highway system. And Europeans
saw it again happen with Spain and Portugal in the early days of the
EU. But
infrastructure has both hard and soft elements. And among the soft
elements is product development. Infrastructure will pave the way for
efficiency but revenues will only come from tangible products.
(Unfortunately, we’re still wedded to the primitive ways of
political patronage and rent-seeking! To add insult to injury, we
hide behind the mantel of nationalism; like we hide behind the law to
trample truth and justice!)
And
as the writer’s friends moved into other businesses, they realized
the imperative to move beyond “economy
[or cheap] brands”
– because they couldn’t compete beyond the local market if their
only ammunition was pricing. And it meant they had to import
technology and knowledge and invest in the state-of-the-art. And the
new mindset allowed them to stretch their thinking about the
business, the market and the world. And that bigger thinking would
raise their ability and confidence to compete head-to-head with
global behemoths.
Why
is the Philippines uncompetitive? Because we have accepted as a given
a very narrow view of the world – i.e., to keep the market to
ourselves. And with an economy driven by OFW remittances and the “big
boys” we have truly kept the market to ourselves. In contrast, a
broad-based economy that is committed, beyond investment, to
technology and innovation would put us in good stead to capture
overseas markets ourselves. Our inward-looking bias meanwhile lends
itself to political patronage and its resulting inefficiencies and
incompetence – thus reinforcing our economic backwardness. And so
despite paying CNN loads of money to project our supposed brand, they
still aired the other half of the story. Of course, in our parochial
confines we have ways to manage news!
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