Choosing our leaders; Singapore interlude

Every day I use the South Super Highway from Alabang to Makati. Construction is now ongoing to extend the skyway up to Alabang. As with most residents in the South, despite more traffic and the inconvenience of fewer lanes I feel good to see the construction of this long delayed project. There are notices saying it will be completed by 2010. But it is worrying that with a new government it may just be stopped. I am more concerned with that as do thousands of commuters who use the skyway to get from home to work than preening presidential candidates.

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I have just come from Singapore and marveled once again at how this small city-state has developed infrastructure that makes life easier for its residents. I will not dwell on the politics of it except to say that the city with its streets, parks, and cleanliness, is a product of a vision and the grand strategy to achieve it. Call it the Singaporean model, but Lee Kuan Yew’s authoritarian democracy has worked for its citizens.

Not so with the Philippines where any attempt to make governance work is derided. Our democracy is devoted to the musical chairs of an ill-conceived presidential system with chaotic electoral politics.

There are some who see the bad effects of such a system but hesitate not to conform with common opinion from surveys and headlines. Instead of government serving its people, it is people who serve government through periodic elections that are nothing more than tribal wars among its elites.

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Inferior leadership qualities come in part from the nature of the presidential system itself. The system encourages money and popularity as criteria for leadership so we elect leaders from this small pool of elites that become dynasties.

It is a closed system except for a few able to break through the barriers. Unfortunately the few are also products of the system so they cannot be expected to have the innovative vision of an outsider.

A parliamentary system would in time open the structure to more qualified and talented individuals without money or popularity but who are able to prove their mettle through party programs in local politics and later move on to national leadership without being anointed by the keepers of the establishment as we have today — the Church, religious cults, oligarchs are some of the kingmakers.

Consequently men and women who think and act on their own have no chance. Neither is the political environment conducive to a grand vision for the country. Under a parliamentary system there are greater chances for men and women with vision to come forward because it is more open-ended. Who knows? One day, under a parliamentary system we will have a prime minister from an impoverished village, steeled in suffering and with a vision for the country rising up through a national party.

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That brings us to the question of whether Senator Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino should be the president of this country. I am afraid that in my book he fails the standards for leadership of this chaotic country. He may be the son of the martyr Ninoy Aquino but he does not quite match the political ardor or skills of his father. As for being the son of Cory Aquino, we have to remember what was then said that her difficulties in governing came from her being “a victim of her own class.”

All this is not to say that she was a figure through which “democracy” was returned to the Philippines after the authoritarian Marcos regime. But alas, in time, we found it was an elite democracy that she returned.

A united country cannot be achieved because of the number of those who attended a funeral cortege. Nor do I think that a democratic country has to think in one direction behind an Aquino candidacy. We must learn to agree to disagree. I disagree and would challenge this attempt yet again to oversimplify the politics of this country. Leadership for the complexity of our country’s problems requires much more than being a good son to good parents.

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I was lucky to be in Singapore to see the exhibit on The Dead Sea Scrolls. The exhibit ends on September 20. There were only four small fragments of the scrolls but it was an experience to see the oldest known Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible. Until another discovery is found these scrolls remain the oldest today. I liked the metaphor used by the guide on the painstaking work of hundreds of scholars and scientists to decipher the scrolls. He said if we were to go home and buy a bag of chips, crush the chips to smithereens and then try to put it together again, that too, was the effort needed to make sense of the scrolls. They had to match each fragment with other fragments using DNA. It is well known that the Roman Catholic Church took its time in cooperating with deciphering the texts of the scrolls. There were differences between what the scrolls said and what it taught. Most intriguing was the missing book of Esther among the scrolls. Esther was the Jewish woman who married a Persian king.

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A video documentary on Faith in the Filipino, Lessons from Raul S. Manglapus will be shown on Tuesday, September 8, 2009, at 6 p.m. at Cinema 4, Power Plant Mall at Rockwell, Makati. It is about his reformist political ideas that inspired a generation of Filipinos. The filmmaker is Isabel Enriquez Kenny, a faculty member of the Communications Department at the Ateneo de Manila University. She is a recipient of the National Book Award for Film in 2005 for her book, Making Documentaries in the Philippines. The film is organized by the Centrist Policy Institute (CPI), and co-sponsored by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS), the ABS-CBN Foundation, Inc. and the Kapit Bisig Para sa Ilog Pasig. The event is sponsored by Petron Corporation, Philippine Gaming and Management Corporation, Jesus V. Del Rosario Foundation, and the CIIF Oil Mills Group.

Kindly confirm your attendance through the KAS office and submit the duly accomplished reply slip no later than September 4, 2009 through e-mail address [email protected].