The Speaker speaks out

Speaker Prospero “Boy” Nograles is really set in pushing for Charter change, and has been working double time to urge Congressmen in coming out with their collective positions and act on this measure before the year is over. Not one to mince words, the Speaker is particularly keen in amending the overly protectionist economic provisions in the Charter which have made a lot of businessmen display only lukewarm interest in doing business in this country. One prohibitive provision is Article 12 limiting foreign ownership of land to just 40 percent – a big turnoff to businessmen who will have to spend a big portion of their capital in paying property rentals instead of using the money to expand their businesses.

If you really look at it, the 40-percent limitation is crazy since people can go around these provisions anyway. And sadly, this has also encouraged fraudulent practices with foreigners marrying Filipinos and naming their spouses as the owners of the real estate property. In even worse cases, some have even resorted to putting up dummy corporations with Filipinos fronting as the owners just to comply with the 60 to 40 ownership provision.

In telecommunications, foreign equity is allowed only up to 40 percent while in media, no foreign equity is allowed at all – which is rather unfortunate since the Philippines has such a wealth of talented people who are making it big in international news outfits, like Rico Hizon who’s with BBC and Veronica Pedrosa, formerly with CNN and now with Al Jazeera. We can also benefit a lot from the technology that these international media entities can impart on local media companies.

For so many years now, businessmen have been pointing out that such restrictive provisions in the Charter have been hampering economic growth since they have kept people from increasing their investments. As a result, more and more foreigners are opting to do business in other countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and even Indonesia and Vietnam whose constitutions do not restrict land ownership by foreigners.

The fact is, there have been a lot of complaints that doing business in this country can be such a pain, with so many procedures that take so long to accomplish. By the time you finally get your business permit, practically half of your capital would have been spent just having all that paperwork accomplished and processed mainly due to bureaucratic red tape.

So do we still wonder why the World Bank says the Philippines lags behind other countries when it comes to ease of doing business? At No. 140, we continue to slide down the list, and even Rwanda whose people are still suffering from the consequences of the genocide which claimed over a million lives outranked us, climbing up from 148th to 139th. In Singapore, it only takes four days to get your business started while in the Philippines, the average is 52 working days, not to mention weekends and holidays which make the waiting time agonizingly long.

The truth of the matter is, the 1987 Constitution really has a lot of flaws. It was drafted hastily and with such paranoia in the sense that many of the provisions were made as a negative reaction to anything that Marcos did or introduced, like a pendulum swinging from the extreme left to the extreme right. Even the foreign chambers that were asked to leave the country are saying these restrictive provisions are the reasons why we are being left behind. At least now with Speaker Nograles, we have someone who understands the need for the Philippines to be more competitive and responsive to global challenges today.

Whatever they may say about Boy Nograles, the fact is he has done a lot to change the image of the House of Representatives and has introduced a lot of badly needed reforms. Even the young Congressmen are happy with the changes being introduced in the Lower House, and they don’t mind being hurried and harried into working double time to fast track a number of important measures and pending proposals.

And if it is true that Joe de Venecia is behind moves to oust Speaker Nograles, then we can only say, “It’s time to call it a day, Joe.” A lot of people believe Speaker Nograles is pushing for Charter change not for his own personal gain but because he really believes it’s about time we did something to give the country a better fighting chance in the global arena, and make foreign investors interested in doing business in this country again.

People say there are so many things wrong in this country, and that so many changes are needed. We can start by amending the Constitution and changing a system that obviously has not been working for us. We can even introduce changes in the judicial system by amending current provisions regarding appointments, so as to once and for all erase the negative perception caused by the recent Court of Appeals controversy that appointees could not really be objective in dispensing their work since they are beholden to those who have appointed them.

At the end of the day, Speaker Nograles should be left in peace to finish his last term as Congressman, and be allowed to push through with the reforms that are really needed not only in the House of Representatives but in the country itself.

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