Improve our investment climate or bust!

I just had a show with Prof. Fernando “Perry” Fajardo for our 11th anniversary on Straight from the Sky where he bewailed the reality that the Philippines (which unfortunately includes Cebu, hahaha!) needed to boost its image as a good investment destination. We’ve known this all along. It seems that under the Aquino government there’s nothing being done to improve this embarrassing situation

Thanks to our having a very bad international image when dealing with government regulators, many of whom are perceived to be corrupt, not to mention that it takes so long for a foreign investor to be given business permits from Local Government Units (LGU). But more often than not, the rules change when these investors are already in place.

Well, ABS-CBN’s ANC came up with the recent Association of South East Asian Nation’s (ASEAN) survey on Regional Competitiveness in attracting Foreign Direct Investments (FDI’s) and the most competitive countries in ASEAN are in this order: Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. The Philippines landed second to the last better than Brunei, which is at the bottom of the list.

This news doesn’t augur well for the Aquino administration, which in my book is still grasping at straws on how to turn the economy around. Their “on-the-job-training” is apparently taking more time than it should. I guess that’s due to the fact that P.Noy must be spending too much time test driving his Porsche. By the way, his figures in the latest surveys dipped sharply. If P.Noy listens to good advice, he ought to jettison that Porsche before it jettisons his Presidency!

Perhaps Pres. Noy has not seen the dark clouds looming in the horizon where so many Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) are returning home from the political unrest in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya and now Jordan, Syria and Japan. This means our unemployment rate would suddenly balloon as these jobless Pinoys would come home to compete with the college graduates.

P.Noy and his Cabinet better come up with solutions to this looming problem soon; otherwise, his popularity would sag even deeper. Already certain groups that supported his Presidency are already turning their backs against P.Noy. Notable among them is Juana Change who once was a rabid Yellow supporter and has now exposed the President’s iniquities, something we already knew during the election campaign of 2010.

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Fugitive Sen. Panfilo “Ping” Lacson who resurfaced last Saturday in Cebu apparently did not have any passport on him when he supposedly traveled from Hong Kong to the Mactan Cebu International Airport Authority (MCIAA) last Saturday. This is exactly the reason why we wrote that texted rumor that Sen. Lacson was not really on board Cathay Pacific’s CX-921, but entered one of the airport bridges in Mactan when CX-921 arrived from Hong Kong.

Come now, how could Hong Kong Airport officials from Chep Lap Kok International Airport allow a passenger to take a flight without any legal documents on his person? Unless of course, if someone from the Philippine Consulate in Hong Kong assisted him. My bet was, if he really came from Hong Kong, then he had the help of the Aquino administration. If the Aquino government didn’t aid him, then Sen. Lacson must have been somewhere here in Cebu hidden by his pals. He still needs a lot of explaining to do!

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I was watching a news item on Sugbo TV about the reenactment of the Talisay Landing, which I have never had the chance to see as no one from Talisay ever thought of inviting me. Seeing the re-enactment, I noticed that part of the skit was a hand-to-hand combat between Japanese soldiers and US soldiers. But history tells a different story. There was no hand-to-hand combat at all. The first units of Amtracks and LVT’s of the Americal Division that hit the beaches of Talisay were struck by mines placed by the Japanese Forces. That stopped the Talisay invasion for an hour and a half.

I write this piece (actually I wrote about the Liberation of Cebu in my Star column last Saturday as I have no Freeman column during Saturdays) in order to correct these obvious non-historic events portrayed by that re-enactment. Whether we like it or not, it is our duty to preserve history as it happened and not put in some kind of Hollywoodish make-believe skits to dramatize that historic event.

This is the problem with the Philippines. More often than not, we change how history was really acted, even our historic dates. Best example is when I was young. We used to march the streets to celebrate Philippine Independence Day on July 4, 1946. Even our Philippine Independence has been changed and is now observed on June 12. What a country!

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