Hindsight and foresight in SE Asia

Michael L. Tan, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Asia News Network, Manila

"Your government is very good," said the man in front of me. I was almost tempted to ask, "Are you talking to me?"

Whenever I attend meetings with delegates from other Southeast Asian countries, I end up confused about how our neighbors look at us. People in the region seem to look up to Filipinos; many very successful Asians have fond memories of having studied or trained here and say they've learned so much from us.

It's not just a matter of our being more articulate in English. Our freewheeling democracy, for all its faults, has trained us well. We speak our minds and engage people in lively discussions. We're able to get people to think and to find solutions.

Yet I suspect we're also being invited to many of the conferences and symposia because we're seen as the basket case of Southeast Asia. We seem to have acquired a reputation for hatching bright new ideas but not being quite able to implement them, or not being able to maintain the gains. Neighbors may be thinking, "If you guys are so smart, why are you so poor?"

I was in Thailand the other week to meet with Southeast Asian colleagues and it was an Indonesian professor who first told me our government was "good," followed later by an Indonesian graduate student. They were referring to how our government, including the President, had handled the deportation crisis in Malaysia.

The Indonesians felt our government acted swiftly and with determination. In contrast, they say their President, Megawati Soekarnoputri, was on one of her many overseas trips and expressed little concern for the Indonesians who were being deported.

They began to praise our entire policy on overseas workers. The Indonesians acknowledge that it's our NGOs and the workers themselves who were able to push for reforms, but they credit the government too for being open to working with other sectors.

However we're still seen, for example, as American lackeys, all too eager to please our American masters and totally insensitive to regional geopolitics.

Our neighbors also perceive our government as having kowtowed to, in the words of one student, "Catholic fanatics." I have been asked about condoms being withdrawn from 7-11 stores, about the emergency contraceptive Postinor being pulled out by the Department of Health after it was approved, about our President insisting there is no population problem, and about our government family planning programs grinding to a halt. Their view is that we too have our own version of religious police calling the shots and dictating policies to a President whom they otherwise admire.

If our neighbors have surged forward, it is not so much because of the skills we shared with them as their having the foresight to plan ahead in many areas of governance and public policy. This foresight includes an ability to learn from their neighbors, picking up from both strengths and weaknesses.

We in the Philippines may have to learn our lessons the hard way, 10 or 20 years down the road, in hindsight.