Working at 32,000 feet

Somewhere over Abu Dhabi — When it comes to air travel, I am one of those unfortunate ones who can hardly sleep on long flights even on the few occasions I’m extended the courtesy to fly Business Class. Having been born with a bad back, sitting or staying still would be the equivalent of requesting for pain from the flight attendants. So what do you do on a long haul if you can’t sleep, seen all the movies and don’t want to eat?

You make the best of it by working. In this case it just so happens that on the same flight we have the British Ambassador to the Philippines Asif Ahmad accompanying the Philippine delegation for the inaugural return flight of flag carrier Philippine Airlines to London. Like me, he also has difficulty catching any sleep in planes. This isn’t my first time to meet Ambassador Ahmad, which is a good thing because it gives me an opportunity to confirm claims by his Filipino support staff that the ambassador is very media-friendly. To be fair ever since we gathered up at NAIA 2 for the departure ceremonies, the ambassador has consistently surprised everybody.

I suppose that would naturally happen when a high-ranking diplomat writes his own speech directly in Tagalog and then delivers its entirety in Tagalog. There was none of the usual smattering or sprinkling of few choice words and greetings; this ambassador said what he did all in our native language. I learned in the course of a 25-minute interview that Ahmad currently speaks 7 languages and presumably knows how to read and write in them. To prepare him for his posting in Manila, Ahmad turned to a Filipina tutor who taught, trained and grilled the ambassador for five months. I suppose there is hope for many of our children in Manila who now speak Pilipino/Tagalog as a second language.

As the newly appointed ambassador, the Philippines is familiar territory for Ahmad. He has visited Manila a number of times in the last 10 years in his role as Director for Asia of the UK Trade and Investment and later as the head of the team in London that covers Britain’s foreign policy interests in ASEAN countries, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. Ahmad joined the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in 1999, after an 18-year banking career with NatWest, which covered international corporate finance, heading office functions as well as going through periods in private banking, Coutts, and running a network of retail banking branches in South London.  Just before becoming a diplomat, he worked with Business Link in London as an adviser to small- and medium-sized companies. Prior to Manila he served as UK Ambassador in Thailand and Laos from 2010 to 2012.

His vast experience certainly makes him a “natural” for doing business in Asia and comes in handy in an assignment where at least 40 percent of his official duties is devoted to engagements with both British and Philippine businessmen with investment interests on both sides. This explains why he is actively seen at many commercial launches of UK brands such as the new model cars from Jaguar and Rolls Royce, as well as promoting cooperation such as in the case of Philippine Airlines where the Ambassador was very involved in getting PAL access and slots to Heathrow Airport.

When I asked him about his observation on the current investment climate in the Philippines, Ahmad said: “ the observation I would make, this is not a criticism, it’s a statement of fact, that if a British businessman wants to do business in the Philippines, business to business interaction (in the Philippines) is probably easiest in the world. Ramon Ang and I hit it off from day one. He said he wanted flights into the UK. I said great! You’ve got slots to Gatwick. He said no, I want to fly into Heathrow, I said well I can sort out the government side of the equation but the business side is going to be expensive. He said you leave business to me you just sort out the government. So we manage to do the slots in terms of permission for PAL and he did the rest. But within 3 weeks this whole thing was done.”

“Where I think its difficult in the Philippines right now is where the government is the purchaser, where there is a big infrastructure project, where there is a small scale contract for a particular agency, because the real focus on transparency which is good, the unintended complication or effect is that the bureaucrats become ultra cautious to the point of paralysis. So projects involving the government is taking far longer than I’m used to. Far, far, longer.”

While his primary duty would be to look after well-being of British citizens in the Philippines, Ambassador Ahmad shared his other concern which is “to reach out to people considering to study in the UK, to work in or just to visit as tourist and there are some myths that have developed that our visa services are very tough and etc., etc.

“By being approachable we can actually start to address those. And I think the reason why we have to try a lot harder is that if you go back 30-40 years, there was a big separation between the developed world and the developing world. We didn’t have to work very hard for people to come to us for most of the things but now its sort of Asia’s turn to be the engine of growth and we can’t just be complacent.”

I doubt very much if Ambassador Ahmad and his team can ever be called complacent considering they are so spread out, engaging the public as well as the media in every effort to promote the UK and vice versa. In fact they are so infectious in their enthusiasm that I pushed for the Ambassador to help bring more British Media programs such as BBC-2 to improve local content, which has largely been from the US or US-inspired media. I also suggested to the Ambassador to pitch for British based technical schools that are quite relevant and useful for Filipinos and not just the traditional upper-class sort of schools Filipinos have slowly become familiar with.

I must say that I was quite impressed that this particular diplomat was more than diplomatic, he was very engaging and yes, he is certainly friendly, not just to the media but to a lot of people.

Mabuhay Ka Ambassador!

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