Democratic solutions to fight poverty (First of two parts)

Empowering the Filipino People

MANILA, Philippines – The recent domino-like outcomes of people’s uprisings in many closed societies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), caused the collapse of the 23 year-old dictatorship of Tunisia’s President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and the 30-year regime of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. These replicas of our 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution and the 1989 downfall of the Berlin Wall were basically caused by people’s hardships and deprivation of freedom and fundamental human rights.

Today, the world is seeing the impending collapse of Libya’s despot, Muamer Khadafy, who has ruled with an iron fist for 42 years. Similar riotous protests for the same reasons of government repression, official kleptocracy, and impoverished people are taking place in MENA, notably Yemen and Bahrain.

Filipinos viewing these traumatic developments on TV are re-living the 1986 EDSA People Power experience, which was non-violent and generally peaceful.

Oppression, repression, violence

These earth-shaking events were sparked by the suicide by self-immolation of a poor, desperate Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, when his humble vegetable cart was overtuned by police last 17 December 2010.

This week, in an unprecendented decision, the UN Security Council voted 15-0 to impose sweeping sanctions against the regime of Muamer Khadafy for his violent responses to street protests, led mainly by courageous family heads and internet-savvy young people. The UN’s sanctions include an arms embargo, global freezes on Khadafy’s assets, and travel holds on 26 relatives and key officials.

For the first time, the US directly called for Khadafy’s resignation and declared its options “open” for political as well as humanitarian actions to end Libya’s suffering.

Outraged world leaders have called for the direct intervention of the International Criminal Court to bring Khadafy to trial – reminiscent of the same way Serbia’s late President Slobodan Milošević was tried by the UN International

Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (2001) and Liberia’s former President Charles Taylor was extradited to the Hague to face trial before the ICC for “crimes against humanity” (2009).

Authoritarianism does not endure

In East Asia, development over this last generation was organized largely by authoritarian governments seeking both to perpetuate themselves and strengthen their regimes against outside intervention.

Nowadays – with the economy in distress – many Filipinos, in their despair, long for a leader strong enough to knock heads together, in order to point the country in the right direction.

To our mind, however, authoritarianism – no matter how benign – will not work in a diverse society like that of the Philippines. The Marcos regime, which was overthrown by the combination of valiant, God-fearing people and a rebellious but professional military component in February, 1986, clearly proved that dictatorship does not endure.

As we have already experienced, the Philippines is democratic enough for people to demand their political rights, yet still feudal for many in positions of authority to regard government as just a means of distributing patronage to preserve their spheres of influence.

Power is slippery and hard to grasp in a multi-cultural society like ours, because most ordinary Filipinos would stand up for their rights and equal place under the sun.

For a national society like ours, authoritarianism becomes a cure worse than the disease.

Democracy is human development

The solutions to our ills we must seek democratically; through government institutions and NGOs that enable ordinary people to obtain their needs for themselves and their communities.

What is it that poor people really need? They need good health in order to enjoy a productive life long enough to raise a quality family of which one could be proud. They need wholesome communities to live in – decent homes, safe workplaces, and crime-free streets.

They need steady sources of income and good education for their children, and jobs for the youngters when grown up.

Poor people need the freedom of choice that predictable incomes enable them to have. Hard work and long hours are not a hindrance to their determination to make good, as long as they aren’t abused by local tyrants.

In any listing of poor people’s priorities, education ranks among the highest – because education is the ultimate ladder of opportunity for aspiring individuals.

Education is more than just an economic advantage in the struggle to earn an honorable and adequate living. More importantly, education enables poor people to look critically at the social situation to which education awakens them – and provokes them to act to transform the society that has excluded their participation.

In East Asia, this great awakening has been responsible for the transformation of even authoritarian states into working democracies.

Building state capacity

Cynics have said that democracy is a luxury poor countries cannot afford.

Now we know that, to the contrary, democracy can sometimes spell the difference between life and death for poor people.

Dr. Amartya Sen’s study of the famines in India, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia led him to believe that mass-starvation can occur – even when there is enough food – if despotic governments remain indifferent to people’s distress.

Hence Dr. Sen, a Nobel laureate (1998), concluded that in these famines, “it was the lack of democracy, not the lack of food, that left millions dead.”

Of course, the lack or absence of democracy can arise, not necessarily from authoritarianism, but simply from state weakness.

In the past decade, “pa-pogi” (or hand-out) programs have been the norm. Popularity contests among leaders have enabled celebrities, oligarchs, and cronies to use their privileged access to government’s machinery to extract “unearned income” from the economy.

The weakness of the Philippine state prevents it from carrying out “hard” reforms and broadening our electoral democracy.

Hence, among our most urgent needs is to build up state capacity – by creating democratic systems, socio-economic institutions, and physical infrastructures that are enduring and autonomous enough to pursue our national modernization.

These structures necessarily include the civil service bureaucracy and political parties – to which both we must infuse with a stronger sense of patriotism.

Winning the anti-poverty battle: Reform!

For transitional democracies like ours, political reform is painful, protracted, and complex – it constitutes change that we can no longer put off.

The poor enforcement of laws and bureaucratic red tape are powerful disincentives to investors that our country’s strategic location and high-quality workers are hard-put to offset.

Corruption is the other massive drag on progress. Its cost we must count not only in money – although God knows that alone is exorbitant enough.

How to check it? One obvious way is to limit state interventionism – by deregulating the economy; by opening up our internal market to foreign competition; and by giving individual enterprise more elbow room.

Government’s proper role is to provide the framework of political stability: the rule of law and official accountability; sound macro-economic policies; and an infrastructure of connectiveness.

All the rest should be up to individual and corporate effort.

A multi-year struggle

The UP economist Arsenio Balisacan estimates that if individual incomes can grow by 3.5% (which in our country is equivalent to about 6% GDP growth), it will take 15 years for the average Filipino poor to cross the poverty line to middle-class status.

Achieving this growth target is difficult – but not impossible. Our high-achieving neighbors have all attained this target over a period of one generation (or four presidential administrations).

Throughout the 1980s, for example, South Korea averaged 9.1%; Taiwan, 8.8%; and Singapore, 7.3%. In the 1990s, Thailand and Malaysia grew by similar rates.

As for China, over these last 20 years, economic growth has raised the lives of 270 million people – in the greatest mass emancipation from poverty the world has seen.

We Filipinos can match our vigorous neighbors in growth levels and poverty reduction, which we did before – during our “tiger cub” period from 1993 to 1997.

How can our war on poverty be won? By effective government that focuses on five essential tasks:

(1) Delivering primary healthcare and quality basic education to the poorest.

(2) Implementing rural development that brings micro-credit, irrigation and power, and farm-to-market facilities.

(3) Devising extension programs that raise agricultural production, and generate incomes off-season and off-farm.

(4) Following macro-economic policies that open markets and generate jobs; encourage investments/savings; and keep local industries competitive.

(5) Protecting OFWs everywhere with pro-active national policies and reinforcing our foreign relations.

Final words: Our OFWs

The trauma of our OFWS in embattled host-countries and/or places where they are still at risk (as in MENA and Taiwan) requires leadership of exceptional vision – to view the future as our socio-economic-cultural synergism with neighboring countries, with mutual benefits for all.

Abangan, next Sunday, Part II, with more on defeating poverty. –FORMER PHILIPPINE PRESIDENT FIDEL V. RAMOS

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