Why are Filipinos so Poor?

In the ’50s and ’60s, the Philippines was the most envied country in Southeast Asia.
What happened?
By F. Sionil Jose
What did South Korea look like after the Korean War in 1953? Battered, poor – but look
at Korea now. In the Fifties, the traffic in Taipei was composed of bicycles and army
trucks, the streets flanked by tile-roofed low buildings. Jakarta was a giant village and
Kuala Lumpur a small village surrounded by jungle and rubber plantations. Bangkok
was criss-crossed with canals, the tallest structure was the Wat Arun, the Temple of the
Sun, and it dominated the city’s skyline. Ricefields all the way from Don Muang airport
— then a huddle of galvanized iron-roofed bodegas, to the Victory monument. Visit
these cities today and weep — for they are more beautiful, cleaner and prosperous than
Manila. In the Fifties and Sixties we were the most envied country in Southeast Asia.
Remember further that when Indonesia got its independence in 1949, it had only 114
university graduates compared with the hundreds of Ph.D.’s that were already in our
universities. Why then were we left behind? The economic explanation is simple. We
did not produce cheaper and better products.

The basic question really is why we did not modernize fast enough and thereby doomed
our people to poverty. This is the harsh truth about us today. Just consider these: some
15 years ago a survey showed that half of all grade school pupils dropped out after
grade 5 because they had no money to continue schooling. Thousands of young adults
today are therefore unable to find jobs. Our natural resources have been ravaged and
they are not renewable. Our tremendous population increase eats up all of our
economic gains. There is hunger in this country now; our poorest eat only once a day
.But this physical poverty is really not as serious as the greater poverty that afflicts us
and this is the poverty of the spirit.

Why then are we poor? More than ten years ago, James Fallows, editor of the Atlantic
Monthly, came to the Philippines and wrote about our damaged culture which, he
asserted, impeded our development. Many disagreed with him but I do find a great deal
of truth in his analysis. This is not to say that I blame our social and moral malaise on
colonialism alone. But we did inherit from Spain a social system and an elite that, on
purpose, exploited the masses. Then, too, in the Iberian peninsula, to work with one’s
hands is frowned upon and we inherited that vice as well. Colonialism by foreigners may
no longer be what it was, but we are now a colony of our own elite.
We are poor because we are poor — this is not a tautology. The culture of poverty is
self-perpetuating. We are poor because our people are lazy. I pass by a slum area
every morning – dozens of adults do nothing but idle, gossip and drink. We do not save.
Look at the Japanese and how they save in spite of the fact that the interest given them
by their banks is so little. They work very hard too.
We are great show-offs. Look at our women, how overdressed, over-coiffed they are,
and Imelda epitomizes that extravagance. Look at our men, their manicured nails, their
personal jewelry, their diamond rings. Yabang – that is what we are, and all that money
expended on status symbols, on yabang. How much better if it were channeled into
production.
We are poor because our nationalism is inward looking. Under its guise we protect
inefficient industries and monopolies. We did not pursue agrarian reform like Japan and
Taiwan. It is not so much the development of the rural sector, making it productive and
a good market as well. Agrarian reform releases the energies of the landlords who,
before the reform, merely waited for the harvest. They become entrepreneurs, the
harbingers of change.
Our nationalist icons like Claro M. Recto and Lorenzo Tanada opposed agrarian reform,
the single most important factor that would have altered the rural areas and lifted the
peasant from poverty. Both of them were merely anti-American.
And finally, we are poor because we have lost our ethical moorings. We condone
cronyism and corruption and we don’t ostracize or punish the crooks in our midst. Both
cronyism and corruption are wasteful but we allow their practice because our loyalty is
to family or friend, not to the larger good.
We can tackle our poverty in two very distinct ways. The first choice: a nationalist
revolution, a continuation of the revolution in 1896. But even before we can use violence
to change inequities in our society, we must first have a profound change in our way of
thinking, in our culture. My regret about EDSA is that change would have been possible
then with a minimum of bloodshed. In fact, a revolution may not be bloody at all if
something like EDSA would present itself again. Or a dictator unlike Marcos.
The second is through education, perhaps a longer and more complex process. The
only problem is that it may take so long and by the time conditions have changed, we
may be back where we were, caught up with this tremendous population explosion
which the Catholic Church exacerbates in its conformity with doctrinal purity. We are
faced with a growing compulsion to violence, but even if the communists won, they will
rule as badly because they will be hostage to the same obstructions in our culture, the
barkada, the vaulting egos that sundered the revolution in 1896, the Huk revolt in 1949-
53.
To repeat, neither education nor revolution can succeed if we do not internalize new
attitudes, new ways of thinking. Let us go back to basics and remember those American
slogans: A Ford in every garage. A chicken in every pot. Money is like fertilizer: to do
any good it must be spread around. Some Filipinos, taunted wherever they are, are
shamed to admit they are Filipinos. I have, myself, been embarrassed to explain, for
instance, why Imelda, her children and the Marcos cronies are back, and in positions of
power. Are there redeeming features in our country that we can be proud of? Of course,
lots of them. When people say, for instance, that our corruption will never be banished,
just remember that Arsenio Lacson as mayor of Manila and Ramon Magsaysay as
president brought a clean government. We do not have the classical arts that brought
Hinduism and Buddhism to continental and archipelagic Southeast Asia, but our artists
have now ranged the world, showing what we have done with Western art forms,
enriched with our own ethnic traditions. Our professionals, not just our domestics, are all
over, showing how accomplished a people we are!
Look at our history. We are the first in Asia to rise against Western colonialism, the first
to establish a republic. Recall the Battle of Tirad Pass and glory in the heroism of
Gregorio del Pilar and the 48 Filipinos who died but stopped the Texas Rangers from
capturing the president of that First Republic. Its equivalent in ancient history is the
Battle of Thermopylae where the Spartans and their king Leonidas, died to a man,
defending the pass against the invading Persians. Rizal — what nation on earth has
produced a man like him? At 35, he was a novelist, a poet, an anthropologist, a
sculptor, a medical doctor, a teacher and martyr. We are now 80 million and in another
two decades we will pass the 100 million mark.
Eighty million — that is a mass market in any language, a mass market that should
absorb our increased production in goods and services – a mass market which any
entrepreneur can hope to exploit, like the proverbial oil for the lamps of China.
Japan was only 70 million when it had confidence enough and the wherewithal to
challenge the United States and almost won. It is the same confidence that enabled
Japan to flourish from the rubble of defeat in World War II.
I am not looking for a foreign power for us to challenge. But we have a real and
insidious enemy that we must vanquish, and this enemy is worse than the intransigence
of any foreign power. We are our own enemy. And we must have the courage, the will,
to change ourselves.

F. Sionil Jose, whose works have been published in 24 languages, is also a bookseller,
editor, publisher and founding president of the the Philippines PEN Center. The
foregoing is an excerpt from a speech delivered by Mr. Jose in Manila, Philippines.