Where are the fruits of these foreign trips?

Here we go again. “Palace says Marcos’ trips yield P4 trillion in investments” (News, 12/27/23) which is said to be the country’s gain from his “19 foreign trips” as of December 2023 with a travel allocation of P893.57 million. A companion piece reported: “Marcos travel fund up 58% at P1.408 billion” (News, 12/27/23) for 2024, per the General Appropriations Act which he already signed into law. That’s quite a ton of taxpayer money! Filipinos naturally wonder if potential expenditures for do-nothing hangers-on have also been factored into that budget.

“Of that amount” (P4 trillion), the report revealed, “$28.53 billion, or P1.59 trillion, was covered with signed memorandums of understanding/letters of intent (MOUs/LOIs), and P1.52 trillion, or $27.34 billion, constituted confirmed investments not covered by MOUs/LOIs still in the planning stage,” among a myriad of more “foreign investments.”

At the tail-end of that particular report, we read: “During his trip to the United States for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders’ Meeting in San Francisco in November, Mr. Marcos got P37.2 billion or $672.3 million in investment pledges.” And there lies the usual buzzkill in practically all the junkets of our public officials since time immemorial. The keywords in all those so-called “investments” are: “memorandums of understanding,” “letters of intent,” “in the pipeline,” and “pledges.” They all boil down to just one word: “promises”—effete, ineffective, and unenforceable gobbledygook in the realm of international politics.

To borrow a cliché, Filipinos have yet to see the foreigners’ money where their “pledging” mouths are. One cannot help recalling how former president Rodrigo Duterte used to go gasconading about bagging humongous “investment pledges” whenever he or his emissaries visited China which Inquirer columnist Richard Heydarian virtually pooh-poohed as nothing more than tommyrot since China had “yet to finalize a single big-ticket infrastructure investment in the Philippines” despite years of eager anticipation from the Duterte administration (“After Duterte: Avoiding China’s ‘pledge trap,’” Horizons, 11/30/21). At the end of his term, Duterte had nothing much to show for most of those supposedly game-changing “pledges.”

Can the Marcos regime give the Filipinos a timetable for his own pastiche of foreign “investment pledges” to come to fruition? Given the unprecedented mandate they have given him, Filipinos hope that Marcos can produce more tangible and meaningful results than his predecessor and help the Philippines claw its way out of being profoundly perceived by the global community as a “third-world country” to this day.

Steve L. Monsanto,
lexsquare.firm@gmail.com