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The Perils of Corazon
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11508 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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10 / 1986 |
2,005 Words |
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Stephen A. Garrett
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One of the paradoxes of politics is that it is often easier to make a revolution than to run a country after the revolution succeeds. In the struggle to overthrow an oppressive dictator or a foreign occupier, people of varying political stripes can rally around the single-minded goal of ridding the nation of the evil besetting them. Differences in ideology and visions of the future can generally be muted in the interests of achieving a united front devoted to the immediate purpose of the revolution. Once "victory" has been achieved, however, there is no longer any unifying force binding together the disparate elements of the revolutionary movement. It is at this point, then, that a challenge arises perhaps greater than any faced in the past: how to translate the fruits of victory into a durable program of progress for the country.
Recent developments in the Philippines testify to the essential truth of the above proposition. President Corazon Aquino, during the first triumphant days of power following the ouster of the Marcos regime, asked for a 100-day "honeymoon" during which she would lay the foundation for a fundamental restructuring of Filipino life. To a considerable extent the afterglow of her successful "People's Power" campaign to topple President Ferdinand Marcos provided her with a margin of grace to begin the hard work of reforming Filipino society. She now faces one of the familiar aftereffects of such honeymoon periods: the necessity of coping with and adjusting to the sometimes dreary and certainly fractious details of day-to-day governance. More substantively, the current challenge facing Aquino is to persuade a majority of Filipinos, including important segments of the power elite, that she is up to the task of transforming that nation in a coherent and positive fashion.
Evidence that she may be feeling the strain of this effort surfaced in a speech she delivered on July 21, 1986, to over 1,000 corporate executives from the Philippines, the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia at a lunch sponsored by several local chambers of commerce. She lectured the business leaders on their hesitancy to invest in new job producing enterprises, which she saw as a failure on their part to help in the country's economic recovery. A common complaint heard from these executives is that such investments made little sense until Aquino could provide greater stability on the Filipino scene. The president was having none of this. "You complain of the uncertainty," she declared. "I am telling you that it is uncertain because you are uncommitted." She pointedly reminded her audience that they had been among her strongest supporters in the campaign to oust Marcos. She referred to their "wild applause" when she promised to "remove the obstacles that prevented you from being the engine of our economy. I have removed the obstacles, but where is the engine?"
Daunting task
The task of restoring some measure of economic stability and hope to the Philippines is in fact a daunting one, and one can understand both Aquino's frustration and the business leaders' caution in confronting the current economic realities. Unemployment or underemployment may run as high as 40 percent. Approximately 70 percent of the nation's families live in poverty. The government must spend almost half of its current export almost half of its current export earnings simply to service the nation's very large foreign debt. The current fiscal deficit is estimated to amount to around $2 billion. Industry is currently operating at only about
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