Left behind

Flights were cancelled, diverted or delayed for hours yesterday afternoon when the power went out at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. The outage knocked out radar and communication facilities at the NAIA control tower, making takeoff and landing extremely dangerous.

Back-up generators, which were supposed to work automatically in a blackout, did not perform as expected. Who bought those lemons, and for how much?

There was no heavy downpour – the usual reason for blackouts in the country’s premier point of entry.

The lemons finally worked at around 5:30 – three hours after the start of the outage. By then at least two international flights had been forced to “return to base” or their countries of origin and scores of other flights had been diverted, cancelled or delayed at all three terminals. Everything was supposed to return to normal at 8 p.m. Shortly before 8, we received an alert that the schedule had been moved to 10 p.m.

This incident will be another black mark when investors rate the Philippines’ competitiveness next year for the annual report prepared by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

Inadequate infrastructure was among the top three problems in the Philippines, after corruption and an inefficient bureaucracy, cited by investors in The Global Competitiveness Report 2009-2010.

The WEF polled 13,000 business leaders, who ranked the Philippines 87th among 133 economies in competitiveness. It was a big drop for the country, which ranked 71st in the Global Competitiveness Index last year.

At around the same time, the World Bank also released its “Doing Business 2009” report, where the Philippines also fell to 140th place among 181 economies, down four notches from last year’s 136th rank in terms of ease in doing business, and way below the 113th rank among 155 economies when the study was started in 2005.

In both studies, the Philippines lagged behind almost all its Asian neighbors. These days the country is ranked ahead only of Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nepal, Timor-Leste and Laos.

Vietnam has overtaken us, and Cambodia may follow suit sooner than we think.

Our government may point to positive economic figures to argue that things aren’t getting worse and are in fact even improving in our country.

But our steady decline in international standing shows that other countries are doing better, and we are being left behind.

As World Bank officials put it, certain countries were more committed than others to reforms.

We, on the other hand, address all problems and implement reforms at a more leisurely pace, at pedicab speed. So from being next only to Japan in terms of human development indicators in the early 1960s, we were left behind by Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore, and then by Malaysia, Brunei, China and India.

From 1997, we started slipping behind Thailand. Now Indonesia and Vietnam are leaving us behind, with neighboring Cambodia hot on its heels.

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While other countries rushed to build state-of-the-art points of entry to showcase their best, we couldn’t even add a single terminal to our cramped, aging international airport without the project becoming mired in a corruption scandal. Germans are not the only investors who have been spooked by the NAIA-3 mess.

The problems raised in the competitiveness report on the Philippines were nothing new.

After corruption, the bureaucracy and infrastructure, investors cited policy instability, access to financing, tax regulation, crime, coup threats, restrictive labor regulations and poor public health system as the problem areas.

Several investors have told me that these days they must also worry every time someone dies, because President Arroyo might declare a national day of mourning and proclaim it as a holiday, disrupting production schedules or else compelling employers to pay for overtime.

The Doing Business report showed that it takes 52 days to start a business in the Philippines, compared to just four days in Singapore, which bagged the top slot for the third straight year.

Why is red tape so hard to cut in the Philippines? Because from the biggest projects to the most minor transaction involving the government, too many people have come to expect grease money before anything moves. The system thrives in delay, in procedural inefficiency.

The system has been in place long before President Arroyo, so she cannot be blamed for everything. Also, some of her officials succeeded in cutting red tape. Anneli Lontoc obtained ISO certification for the Land Transportation Office when she was its head. It now takes only a few minutes to obtain a driver’s license from the LTO, which was once among the agencies most notorious for red tape and fixers. Avelino Cruz cut the steps for military supply bidding and procurement when he was defense secretary.

Both Lontoc and Cruz are no longer in those posts, unfortunately. But Esperanza Cabral is still doing a good job at the Department of Social Welfare and Development. So is Health Secretary Francisco Duque III; even his infomercials truly serve a purpose, although if he wants to avoid controversy, he can take out his photos from the ads.

These officials have shown that bureaucratic efficiency and reforms are possible even when the leadership is corrupt.

Other sectors need not wait for an ideal leader to come along, although in our society, a strong leader who can set a good example in terms of integrity and efficiency will greatly speed up reforms.

In the absence of that kind of leadership, everyone can still do his part. President Arroyo famously said, a long time ago when she still enjoyed post-EDSA II goodwill, that the nation had to reform or perish.

There is no room for complacency, and we can’t keep waiting for the perfect leader. We all have to start reforming or else perish – even without the necessary leadership. –Ana Marie Pamintuan (The Philippine Star)