“Who among competent and highly qualified managers in the private sector would still want to enter public service after seeing what happened to the shortened shelf life of GM Chiong?”
Images of August 21, 1983 flashed back in my mind. Forty years have passed. How time quickly flies.
Back on that day, I was up at dawn, proceeded to my office where we loaded a truck full of streamers and placards on which was written “Ninoy, Hindi Ka Nag-iisa,” a message I cleared weeks before with then UNIDO president Salvador “Doy” Laurel, in the presence of Ninoy’s younger sister, Tessie Aquino Oreta, and his cousin, Eva Estrada-Kalaw.
By seven that morning, we parked at the vicinity of the Manila International Airport, our truck covered with a sheet of tarpaulin, mindful of the heavy presence of the military in the area.
Around 9 or 10, Ninoy’s welcomers had marched into the airport, just a few hundreds, from Batangas, Laguna, Tarlac, Pasay, Manila. My workers started distributing the placards and streamers to them.
After a quick lunch of sandwiches earlier prepared by Tita Eva Kalaw’s women brigade (NOW), some of us joined Doy and Eva to the terminal and awaited Ninoy’s arrival.
Then shortly after the China Airlines flight arrived from Taipei, and after taxiing to the terminal, shots were heard. The rest is history.
Fast forward now to 40 years after the murder at the tarmac ignited a popular uprising that caused the fall of the dictatorship 37 years ago, what kind of nation have we got?
So we have a democracy in form—elected officials, even if vote-buying and cheating accompany their election, a tripartite system of checks and balances even if these are honored more in the breach than in the right practice, a justice system skewed towards the protection of the mighty, greased by money more often than not, and a “free” press obscured by fake news.
And many more issues, both political and economic, that tell us the social ills that authoritarianism promised to end, and failed, are the same ills that democratic form pledged to end, and continues to fail.
I was younger and childless when Ninoy was murdered at the tarmac. I have been blessed with three children and six grandchildren since then.
In the autumn of my mortal life, while I do not regret, and in fact treasure the memory of my role in those days when we fought the dictatorship, I am saddened by the collective failure of those of us who came after Ninoy’s death to set things right for the sake of our people.
If we were mired in poverty then, with an emaciated and malnourished Joel Abong of Negros in the cover of Time magazine, are we better off with millions subsisting on a diet of broken rice and instant noodles nowadays, with “pagpag” or scavenged left-overs as occasional feast?
Are we better off now, when politicians and the nouveau riche parade their multi-million fashion decadence while millions make do with ukay-ukay, the hand-me-downs of foreigners?
Where billion-peso mansions are built on million-peso per square meter land while millions exist amid the squalor of urban warrens in the inner cities of our broke-down metropolis?
Why are we so despondent, such that marginal economic upliftment is possible only through a diaspora that started 50 years ago, and has increased several times over?
There are many answers, some of which we have written in this space over and over again, as with many other media observers of our passing scene.
Singapore and Malaysia experimented with authoritarian rule, but they have succeeded in uplifting lives.
Thailand, despite many changes in leadership through coups, thrives compared to our economy. Vietnam, which less than 50 years ago rose from a most destructive war that cost millions of lives, has now edged us out.
And Indonesia, with similar archipelagic geography and 2.6 times more population, is graduating from poverty.
Nakakapagod na. We keep changing leaders, but the same problems persist, most even getting worse, with little hope of meaningful change in sight.
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Reformers with good intentions and management abilities enter public service from the private sector, yet they face a bureaucratic wall of atrophied effectiveness.
And when they shake things up, as they must, like Cesar Chiong in the airport now renamed in honor of Ninoy Aquino, and have shown immediate results that have made going to the airport a better experience, they get cashiered for exercising management prerogative.
What happened to Chiong sends more than just a chilling effect on citizens from the private sector who want to do their share in reforming public service.
Who among competent and highly qualified managers in the private sector would still want to enter public service after seeing what happened to the shortened shelf life of GM Chiong?
Unless their motivation is personal interest rather than contributing to genuine reforms in the bureaucracy and governance systems, why would they enter government?
Till now, only a few of the Napoles cohorts in milking public funds with ghost projects have been charged by our justice system.
And those who were charged have not only been cleared by the courts concupiscent with highly-paid lawyers, but even returned to the offices they have abused by our electorate.
Did Ninoy Aquino die in vain? Was replacing authoritarian rule with democratic order just a zero-sum effort?
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The untimely demise of our friend Susan “Toots” Ople, who presided over the operationalization of the newly-formed Department of Migrant Workers, leaves us sad and diminished.
More so is the loss felt by our overseas workers, whose concerns Toots, even in the private and non-governmental sector, championed tirelessly.
Despite her failing health, she agreed to join the Marcos Jr. Cabinet, and within the short period that she was DMW secretary, the Filipinos in their diaspora felt they had an ally, an advocate, a quick problem solver, and a champion.
Ave atque vale, Toots.