The latest edition of the Arroyo camp’s crying “Wolf!” series is Elena Bautista-Horn’s smiling announcement of a death plot against her mistress. As it turned out, this preposterous fairy tale did not stop the transfer of La Gloria to the Veterans Memorial Medical Center, where her administration held ousted President Joseph Estrada a decade ago.
Whether it’s karma, justice or even random chance, it appears that the “little girl” who plundered the Philippines with impunity for almost a decade is now receiving her comeuppance.
Factions and phalanxes have formed around both Arroyo and President Aquino, each doing their best to promote the interests of their tunnel-visioned groups. In doing this, the warring sides are missing an opportunity. Given a half-decent program, the Philippines can catalyze a worldwide economic recovery. Such a feat may not need finances as much as a network in place to pull it off. And the overseas workers and the immigrants from our country certainly comprise such a global network that can be readily mobilized by the current convergence of modern technologies.
Equally important, the Philippines also has natural resources and innate talent to link its indigenous native wealth to such a global Filipino network and the rest of the world. If Filipino leaders can just survey the local initiatives that are already showing results and replicate these into a cohesive program, the attention of most Filipinos can be redirected from a no-win bickering over Arroyo’s crimes and punishments toward a positive and productive win-win formula for sustainable livelihood, environmental balance and self-reliant communities.
P-Noy needs only a few congressmen and senators to work with the private sector to do this. P-Noy may not even need politicians if the private sector decides that it wants to do this all by itself. The small upticks in the ratings of Transparency International and the hopeful moods measured by recent surveys are all indicators that people are ready to march on the daang matuwid.
But the Filipino people still need a piper and a song. If P-Noy plays the piper, many beautiful songs can be produced. One of those could be “BalikProbinsiya,” a countryside entrepreneurship advocacy seeking to replace an obsolete employment-dependency mindset.
Crying “Wolf!” won’t solve problems: honest work will.
—JOSE OSIAS, jzosias@gmail.com