Left behind JP/7/INQUI

Left behind

Philippine Daily Inquirer Asia News Network Manila

The Bangkok Post reported last week that the Thai government had "quietly awarded a contract" to a Hong Kong engineering company "to conduct a feasibility study on the ambitious plan to dig a canal across the Kra Isthmus."

Ambitious does not begin to describe it. A canal in the south of Thailand that would link the Andaman Sea with the Gulf of Thailand, a commentator in the South China Morning Post observed, "could turn Singapore, some say, into the world's former busiest port."

The project is by one estimate expected to cost some US$35 billion -- if it pushes through. That's a very big if, because the basic idea is as old as it is grand. Through the years, the idea to build a canal that will allow ships from Europe and the Middle East to bypass the "congested and pirate-infested" Strait of Malacca on their way to Asia has drawn its share of skeptics.

And the Thai government has neither the money nor the inclination to fund the canal's construction. Even the feasibility study will be paid for by the Hong Kong company, Phuket Pass Project, which has already committed an initial investment of $50 million.

Will the canal prove to be Thailand's field of dreams? Thailand -- the Philippines' closest ally in the region, and in many ways almost the country's mirror image -- is thinking 10 or 20 years down the road, and international investors are bankrolling their big ideas.

Yet the Philippines thinks ahead only to the next election. Thus the country is stuck in the past, fighting old battles all over again. The manufactured clamor for constitutional change is one example. This campaign assumes that political maturity and economic growth are dependent on crucial social documents -- as if the endemic problems of, say, corruption in government or the boom-bust economic cycle can be truly solved only when the constitutional slate is wiped clean and the country begins all over again. But surely this kind of thinking has been proven false already -- in the first half of the 20th century!

The perpetual struggle for clean elections and an honest count is another example. The National Movement for Free Elections was set up, not without controversy, in the 1950s. That there is still a pressing need for its existence today is a sweeping indictment not only of the organization but of the country's entire electoral infrastructure.

While we are mired in the endless debate over the status of Terminal 3 of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, Hong Kong's Chek Lap Kok airport (a truly world-class facility that opened in 1997) is already adding a new wing. While we discuss the pros and cons of a railway system to connect Central Luzon to Metro Manila or another one to criss-cross Mindanao, China has already launched the world's fastest trains. And so on, ad nauseam.

We do not mean to say that economic wellbeing is the only gauge of a viable, vibrant nation. No republic can be strong if the best talents, the bulk of airtime and newsprint, the energies of millions, are sucked into the black hole of politics.

The time between the first President Macapagal and the second tells a heartbreaking story. Forty years ago, we were the second strongest economy in Asia. Today we are an also-ran. The catastrophe is explained in large part by the insidious impact of the Marcos dictatorship. During those dark years, we did not only misuse billions of dollars; we became a thoroughly political people.

That is to say, we learned to play politics and, eventually, to substitute politics for performance. While the region's dragons stretched their wings and the tigers flexed their muscles, we chased after our own tail.

In this sense, President Macapagal-Arroyo's Rizal Day definition of the legacy she wants to leave behind -- economic recovery, a less corrupt government, clean elections in 2004 -- are laudable but extremely short term. That this is all she is gunning for is a measure of how low our standards have fallen.