So Third World!

My son who works in Singapore came home over the long weekend. He had good words for the PAL flight he took… the in-flight meal was surprisingly good enough to eat, he said. Best of all, the cost of the ticket was competitive with other local and regional budget carriers.

 But his sinus allergy started acting up as soon as he stepped out of NAIA 2. It has to be the bad air quality of Manila. I have a similar problem which makes it necessary for me to take a daily dose of an anti-allergy pill.

But he soon enough remembered what he despises most about Manila: traffic. He drove  from the Makati office of his bank to our home via EDSA and C-5 and it exasperated him. “It’s so Third World, Pop,” he exclaimed, “like no one is in control.”

How could I tell him that indeed, no one is in control. The MMDA chairman had been busy playing alalay to Miss World and watching the NBA games while Metro Manila was in a gridlock. It took my wife from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. to drive home from Makati a day before my son arrived.

Resty Perez, a friend of mine from way back, also wrote me about that traffic gridlock my wife experienced. “Traffic was horrible last night because of the rains that really did not last that long. We have gotten used to this, which is the wrong kind of attitude. We must nag the government for action as you have been doing.

“The sight of hundreds of people waiting for the buses that would come probably hours later, having been caught in the gridlock, drove home your point. Something must be done!

“Talagang kawawa sila. I saw five schoolchildren fully soaked in their uniforms. Others walked, and it was late, around 11 p.m. What time will they get home?

“Northbound Skyway was backed up two kilometers and I guess mainly because Magallanes was flooded again, or EDSA where it cuts through was a knot.

“A better MRT or LRT could have saved the day. Please continue your crusade. If we have to shame the NPAs (non-performing assets) in government, including the incognito usecs, sama ako.

“But most of all, P-Noy must do something. Siya ang susi. How to make him move? Get mad? Will the picture of the five soaked schoolchildren help? Pictures can break hearts better than words.”

Another friend, Ed Yap, a businessman who is chairman of the urban development committee of the Management Association of the Philippines, also e-mailed me his tale of frustration. It is a long e-mail and here is a portion of it:

“What usually takes a long 45 minutes to negotiate the short distance from Makati to Greenhills took all of four hours that evening… During those long hours, people were on their own with no help from the authorities. For both motorists and commuters, it felt like there was no government. It was as if the authorities have capitulated to the elements and left the people to their devices.

“It is incomprehensible, to say the least, that such hardship is inflicted time and again on Metro Manilans. In the private sector, such a situation is usually deemed symptomatic of a dysfunctional organization. Much time had passed and by now, one would expect that measures have been taken to mitigate the predictable effects of heavy rains on traffic and the road network.

“But, sadly, it appears that such is not the case. A modicum of good urban management was scarcely in evidence. Traffic aides, who are most needed during rush hours and heavy downpours, were not even at their post that evening.

“Despite there being a field office under the flyover at the crucial EDSA-Ortigas Avenue intersection, there was not a single traffic aide present. As a result, it was chaos and anarchy. The law of the jungle prevailed.

“The zebra verboten zone was violated as exasperated motorists ignored the traffic signal light. Although the way ahead was not clear, motorists entered and hogged the intersection, blocking the way for others. There was nobody to untangle the gridlock.

“Normally well-composed people lost their temper and became bad-mannered motorists. It was everyone for himself. It was survival of the most brazen. The same situation obtained in other intersections.”

My son went back home to Singapore on Tuesday afternoon so he was not around to experience a two hour power blackout in our home. It happens almost every time there is a fairly strong downpour, a little thunder and lightning and there goes our power.

We have lived for over 30 years in our home, just a little further than a stone’s throw away from the Meralco Ortigas head office, and it is the same old story when a thunderstorm comes around. We once asked a Meralco lineman what seems to be the problem and were told it was a transformer or some equipment bursting at the corner of Katipunan and Santolan.

The thing is, we had two such occurrences over a space of a week, including the one last Tuesday. As the power outage happens… it sputters for a few minutes, going on and off and destroying our appliances before it completely blacks out.

I can understand this sort of thing happening in the past because Ate Glue didn’t like the then controlling interests of Meralco and suffocated them of the profits needed to upgrade service. But now, years after the so called performance-based rate setting was adopted, I see no reason for lousy service.

All these so called Performance-based ek ek, be it for setting Meralco rates or for justifying hefty bonuses for SSS executives, is being used to fool us all into giving them more money for not very much service. And the government that is supposed to protect us is complicit in this grand deception.

So there I was in total darkness with nothing to do except to feel sorry for myself. As my son so aptly puts it, “it’s so third world, Pop!”

My son should know. He had been abroad for over ten years now since he graduated from Ateneo and had worked in Ireland and Silicon Valley and studied in Cambridge, England before accepting a job in Singapore.

My son is one of today’s Global Pinoys… and they know from experience it shouldn’t be like this and it can be better… as it is better elsewhere. Those of us who live here shrug our shoulders and accept bad service as a fact of life.

This reminds me of an article of economist Paul Krugman on the economics of bad English food. According to Krugman, English food was for the longest time, deservedly famous for its awfulness. “Now it is not only easy to do much better, but traditionally terrible English meals have even become hard to find.”

According to Krugman, “too-early urbanization, taking place before it was possible to bring lots of fresh food in from the countryside, established dismal dietary habits that were hard to break.”

He continues: “By the time it became possible for urban Britons to eat decently, they no longer knew the difference…  your typical Englishman, circa, say, 1975, had never had a really good meal, he didn’t demand one. And because consumers didn’t demand good food, they didn’t get it. Even then there were surely some people who would have liked better, just not enough to provide a critical mass.

“And then things changed. Partly this may have been the result of immigration… Growing affluence and the overseas vacations it made possible may have been more important—how can you keep them eating bangers once they’ve had foie gras?

“But at a certain point the process became self-reinforcing: Enough people knew what good food tasted like that stores and restaurants began providing it--and that allowed even more people to acquire civilized taste buds.”

Going back to our situation, there has to be more of us harassed consumers and outraged citizens demanding better from government and the public utilities. And because there are more Pinoys who have global experiences and outlooks like my son, there are more of us who know better.

In this high tech age, there is no reason why a little rain should cause the electricity service in my subdivision to drop. I probably didn’t know any better over the past 30 years and accepted Meralco’s excuses as valid. But all my children are Global Pinoys now and they have opened my eyes to the fact that what we are getting here sucks… so third world one would expect from a dark corner of Africa. I, we, should not stand for it any longer.

Fault

From the Professional Heckler:

Phivolcs reported the quake was likely caused by the East Bohol fault.

Malacañang believed however, it was GMA’s fault.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco