Roilo Golez: Philippine Quest for First World Status

THE QUEST FOR FIRST WORLD STATUS
Speech of Congressman Roilo Golez
2d District of Paranaque
Senior Deputy Minority Leader

In 1966, when I left for America selected by the Philippine Government to study in the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, I left behind a nation that was then ranked number 2 in Asia, second only to Japan in economic development. At that time, we boasted of a shipbuilding industry, car assembly factories, demonstrated capability to manufacture appliances and electronic products, we had the world’s biggest dome coliseum, the first airline in Asia and many more achievements that were the envy of our neighbors.
We were ahead of such countries as Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore. Thailand and Malaysia were primitive economies compares to us.
Forty years later, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore have become first world countries. Our economy cannot compare with their very advanced economies. More saddening, Thailand and Malaysia have overtaken us.
Now, Vietnam, which was in the middle of a ravaging war during all the time that I was studying at Annapolis, threatens to overtake us with their blazing growth rate of eight per cent per annum for the last ten years.
China and India, countries that used to be examples of poverty and starvation in the sixties (there used to be the expression “think of the millions starving in China?”), are now on the road to becoming super power economies.
We have definitely fallen behind in Asia and the region. Thinking of all the lost opportunities, thinking of all the broken dreams, of how we could have become another South Korea or Taiwan…these are thoughts that can make one cry.
But we did not exactly stagnate. We have made big leaps since forty years ago. Except that our Asian neighbors have made much bigger leaps.
We have continued to be a world competitor and we still have chances for greatness.
Yes, we have achieved a lot and we only need to raise the bar.
Let me cite some of our world class achievements.
We are a world class call center hub, now no. 3 in the world, next only to India and China.

The Philippines ranks No. 4 worldwide in competence and skills for the information and communications technology (ICT), per survey of a US-based company, the Meta Group, beating developed countries like the US, Canada, France and Australia in producing ICT professionals and workers.

Intel has been in the Philippines for 33 years and its Philippine plant produces its most advanced products that make millions of modern PCs worldwide.

Texas Instruments in Baguio produces the DSP chips that are the brains behind a cell phone, and this Filipino product powers 100% of all Nokia cell phones and 80% of Erickson cell phones!

High end Toshiba laptops are produced in Laguna.

Panasonic in Sta. Rosa, Laguna manufactures millions of cell phones exported worldwide.

If you are driving a Benz or a BMW or a Volvo, it is very likely that the ABS system in your car was made in the Philippines.

Mitsubishi Motors will reportedly transform the Philippines as their production hub for spare parts and components for Mitsubishi and Daimler-Chrysler vehicles.

Trend Micro, makers of the top anti-virus software PC-Cillin develops its cures for viruses in Eastwood Libis. When a new virus is detected, the Eastwood Libis team can find a solution within 45 minutes.

The giant high tech company America Online or AOL has 1,000 people in Clark answering 90% of AOL's global email inquiries.

Proctor and Gamble has over 400 people in Makati (average age is 23 years old) doing backup office work for their Asian operations including finance, accounting, HR, and payments processing.

Citibank's global ATM programming is done here in the Philippines.

Most of our exports are high tech.

The semiconductor and electronics industry in the Philippines contributes at least 60% annually to the country's total export sales. These are diverse products like ICs, discrete semiconductors, semiconductor modules, electronic components, floppy disk drives, CD-ROM technology and computer processors.

We are now exporting cars in quantity. Ford Philippines has reportedly exported more than 50,000 units of the Lynx and Escape cars during the last five years.
The Tsuneishi Group shipyard in Balamban, Cebu can construct a huge bulk carrier in 45 days. There is also the $1 billion Hanjin shipyard coming up in Subic. When the two shipyards finally combine operations, they will easily make the Philippines the world’s fourth biggest shipbuilder after Korea, Japan and China!
214,000 Filipino seamen and merchant marine officers have strengthened the world's maritime industry. Practically every major oceangoing ship has a Filipino seaman.

Many companies in Indonesia are managed by Filipinos.

Banks and sophisticated financial institutions in Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, London and New York have Filipinos occupying key positions.

Filipino nurses and doctors provide world class health care to citizens of the first world countries.

Many factories in Taiwan, South Korea and Japan depend on highly skilled Filipino workers.

Many shops in Saudi Arabia prominently display the sign "We have Filipino workers" to attract more customers because Filipinos there have established a reputation for reliability and excellence.

And a most remarkable phenomenon is now happening in the field of education in the U.S.

A hundred years ago, the U.S. sent hundreds of teachers now called Thomasites to teach Filipinos the three Rs. Now, we have reversed the situation. We are sending not just hundreds but thousands of Filipino teachers to the U.S. to teach Americans Math, Science and English. Many of these Filipino teachers are now in California and Texas. U.S. demand for teachers is expected to balloon to two million in the next ten years.

There are now more than eight million Filipinos working abroad and an average of one million go abroad every year for work.

Filipinos in New York, according to a US census, have the highest median income among all ethnic groups, higher than European-Americans, Japanese-Americans and Hispanic-Americans.

From the aforementioned presentation, I dare say that our best performers can compete with the best performers of the world.

The challenge is how to make the rest of the nation generally in sync with our best performers and accelerate our economic development.

I propose the following four-point development strategy:

First, the government must be made 100% economy-oriented.

I believe that it is the duty and role of government to enhance the economic well-being of every citizen of the Republic.

Therefore, if I had my way, every agency of the government… including the military and the police… must justify its existence in terms of how it contributes to economic development.

When the military proposes an additional one division or brigade or battalion of soldiers, the AFP and the DND must justify the mobilization of additional soldiers in economic terms. The AFP must explain how those additional soldiers would help expand economic activities in the places where they would be deployed.

Same for additional policemen. Same for a new airport. Same for more firetrucks. Same for additional school buildings.

If I had my way, every expense of the government, every activity, and every government agency must be justified in terms of how such expense or activity or agency will contribute to the economic well-being of its citizens and how to make the Filipino more globally competitive.

Second, I believe we should fully harness to our advantage God’s gift to us: a vast amount of human capital. Our vast human capital is our global competitive edge.

We should aim at deploying more Overseas Filipino Workers. We already have eight million abroad but we can still do much more.

Filipinos workers are deployed all over the world. See the map of the world and look at how Filipino workers are strategically positioned in practically every country, some in countries many Filipinos have not even heard of.

They contribute enormous amounts of dollars to help strengthen our economy. Last year, OFWs remitted more than $13 billion during the first eleven months.

To fully harness our vast human capital, the government must make Education fully responsive to both local and international requirements, to make our human capital globally competitive.

If I had my way, the Department of Education and the Commission on Higher Education or CHED must be placed at the vanguard of the most important components of our economic development group.

Today, the Department of Education and CHED are under the Social Services Group in the budget presentation of the government and I feel that is wrong. During the last budget debate, I questioned that and I said that Education should be treated as an economic development agency, instead of a social service entity because of how the country’s level of education critically affects the country’s economic development level.

We should take a close look at the employment needs not only of the Philippines but the whole world and design our education strategy according to global requirements.

Many countries, like Western European countries, Japan, South Korea and the United States are now facing acute manpower problems because of the zero population growth that they adopted in the past decades. Now they are running out of workers.

Those countries cannot produce overnight the millions of workers they need to man their factories and offices. With a good education program, we can produce in just a few years competent, world-class workers for the needs of those countries.

And those additional OFWs will further strengthen and expand the Philippine economy they way OFWs are doing now.

Don’t think that 10% of our population working abroad is too much.

During the 70s, Greece followed the same strategy to dramatically boost their economy. Of the 13 million Greeks during that time, four million lived abroad, 3 million of them lived abroad permanently. Greece at its peak had more than 20% of their population working abroad. They remitted more than a billion dollars a year and that boosted their economy. When their economy improved, the Greeks starting coming back to further boost their economy. The same reverse migration in due time will happen in the Philippines.

If I had my way, we should aim at the same 20% target for Filipinos working abroad or around 18 million Filipinos from the present eight million level.

We can achieve that through a good, responsive world-oriented education program and by simplifying the procedures for the placement of overseas workers.

If I had my way, the processing for overseas Filipino workers should be simpler and faster and at a much lesser cost so that those who dream of working abroad, like many of you here, can realize their dream of having a better life while helping accelerate the country’s economic growth.

The third point is to invest more in science and technology, especially in ICT.

South Korea made a big leap as an economic tiger when in the late sixties and early seventies, then South Korean President Park Chung Hee gave priority to science and technology intensive products like radios, television and microwave ovens where they eventually became among the world leaders. Their education program stressed science, engineering and mathematics.

In ICT, we have the competitive edge versus most of the world. We are ranked number 4 in the world in producing ICT professionals.

But to make a big leap the way India and China did in the past several years, we must encourage ICT entrepreneurial ventures where a successful ICT product can command sales by the hundred million dollars.

If I had my way, government should provide seed capital or venture capital to ICT entrepreneurs who have the potential to develop best selling concepts like Google, YouTube, electronic games, animation, software, etc.

China and India did it. I see no reason why we cannot duplicate India’s Wipro or China’s billion dollar joint venture with Microsoft.

And finally, the fourth point, we should have an action plan to consciously and deliberately transform the rest of the population to world class standards.

Let’s look at two examples of competitiveness.

First, there is South Korea which has gone way, way ahead of us after being our equal or even inferior in the mid sixties.

And then there is Vietnam which is threatening to catch up with us, when it was a war zone, a virtual wasteland in the mid sixties.

Let’s look at South Korea.
We marvel at, nay, we are awed by one of the greatest economic miracles in the history of mankind: the South Korean miracle. What is their formula for success?
In his paper “Technology and Korea’s Business Systems in Action (Revised 1999 -forthcoming in Continuity and Change in Asia’s Business Systems)“ Linsu Kim of Korea University and the MIT Sloan School of Management, submits that:

“The high levels of education are not the only labor force factor influencing the rapid development of technological capabilities in Korea. Another factor is one that both reflects and contributes to “national culture”: a strong emphasis on discipline and effort, and a willingness to work extremely hard to achieve goals.

“The emphasis of the school system on discipline and effort is (an)… explanatory factor, reinforced for every male Korean by three years of compulsory military service in a context where the threat of invasion is by no means illusory.

“Korean scholars have identified what they call the “han psyche.” It is rooted in a Confucian-based status system requiring children in the family, employees in the company, and people in society generally to behave with outward respect towards fathers, superiors, and rulers, regardless of any feelings of unfairness or frustration. This inability to change the context of action, and the need to excel in order to win approval from authority figures, produces enormous energy that is directed towards tenacious efforts to strive for the betterment of one’s family and one’s country. The image of the tenacious, almost driven Korean is grounded in reality.”

Discipline is therefore central to South Korea’s success.
In the case of Vietnam, many are expressing concern that if we don’t get our act together, Vietnam might overtake us.
That concern is not unfounded considering Vietnam’s impressive growth performance in the last decade.
What is Vietnam’s secret?
In 2004, General Secretary Nong Duc Manh, presiding over the ninth Plenum of the Communist Party of Viet Nam Central Committee, announced that one of the targets of the 2001-2005 five-year plan – with a view to narrowing the development gap between Viet Nam and regional countries and create favorable conditions for the next five-year plan – it was:
Target no. 5. “Special attention should be paid to renewing the Party leadership method, building the rule of law, promoting democracy, enhancing discipline and consolidating the great national unity.”
Thus, discipline is one of the development pillars of Vietnam.

Discipline used to be part of our national development strategy.

In 1972, we experimented with a massive national discipline campaign with the slogan:

“SA IKAUUNLAD NG BAYAN, DISIPLINA ANG KAILANGAN”

That was one of the slogans of the Martial Law years under the late President Ferdinand Marcos. To those who were already alive and with a certain degree of discernment that time, that slogan was one of the most remembered and probably the most transforming.

Whatever the people’s feelings are about the Marcos regime, many concede that the Marcos program to inculcate National Discipline was one of the positive legacies of that period.

Unfortunately, thirty five years after, the ills that afflicted our society then, continue to afflict our society today.

There is chaos on the roads as traffic rules are violated with impunity.

Public sea, air and land transport units are frequently late.

There is rampant littering in public places like streets and parks.

Discourteous and tardy employees disrupt government services.

Respect for parents and elders is waning.

And admittedly, in the House of Representatives, there had been the historically chronic failure to muster quorum.

These ills are attributable to lack of national and personal discipline, and they spill over in our national production effort, in our factories and in government offices.

If we dream of approximating what South Korea has achieved in less than a generation and prevent a country like Vietnam from overtaking us, I believe we must revisit the slogan: “SA IKAUUNLAD NG BAYAN, DISIPLINA ANG KAILANGAN”

Before civil libertarians and detractors of the late President Marcos rise in protest and shock, let me stress one point.

The inculcation of discipline is enshrined in and mandated by our Constitution.

The Constitution mandates all educational institutions to develop discipline among students. Article XIV (EDUCATION, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, ARTS, CULTURE AND SPORTS), Sec. 3 states:
“They shall inculcate patriotism and nationalism, foster love of humanity, respect for human rights, appreciation of the role of national heroes in the historical development of the country, teach the rights and duties of citizenship, strengthen ethical and spiritual values, develop moral character and personal discipline... “

To libertarians, let me state that even the internationally revered Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is a strong adherent of discipline as a vital ingredient of human and economic development.

In her acceptance speech as recipient of the 5th Annual Gandhi Award, given Oct. 2, 1995, Madam Aung San Suu Kyi stated:
“It is only through our disciplined efforts that we can achieve the highest norms of human development that cover political stability, sustained economic growth and social harmony.”
Discipline has its deep spiritual and philosophical foundations.

St. Thomas Aquinas, the philosopher theologian of the 13th Century, the Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Universalis, considered by many Roman Catholics to be the Church's greatest theologian, was asked about “the purpose of human law, that is, of the law to be articulated and enforced by political authority.”

Aquinas replied as follows:

“As we have stated, man has a natural aptitude toward virtue; but the perfection of virtue must be acquired by man by means of some kind of disciplining (disciplina) ... a man needs to receive this discipline from another…It was necessary for such to be restrained from evil by force and fear, in order that, at least, they might desist from evil-doing, and, …. being habituated in this way, might be brought to do willingly what hitherto they did from fear, and thus become virtuous. Now this kind of discipline, which compels through fear of punishment, is the discipline of [human] laws.” (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.II 95.1, tr. Pegis, adapted)

The Bible enjoins discipline as a virtue:
1. Hebrews 12:11 “No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, for those who been trained by it, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace.”
2. Titus 1:7 “For God did not give us a spirit of timidity but one of power, love and self-discipline.”
The clamor for national discipline is everywhere.
It is in cyberspace.
Diosdado Lopega, an ordinary Filipino overseas worker doing social work in Taiwan, published an article in the internet entitled “Of Discipline, Economic Prosperity and Dignity.”
In very simple, yet eloquent words, he heaved out the longings and heartaches of many Filipinos who have personally seen how much we have fallen behind neighbors like South Korea and Taiwan.
Diosdado Lopega, writes:
“As migrant workers, we have important roles to play towards such an end. And the simplest we can do is to change our ways, and instill discipline in ourselves. We believe that the key to our economic development does not lie in the impeccable economic plans of the government but does lie in the people - we. Sad to note, it seems that we failed to internalize the basic discipline our parents and teachers taught us. Oftentimes, we keep on pointing our fingers at government officials blaming them for our country's economic collapse.
… “There are … simple things that we can do to help the government and in the Philippines… We can for example, line up and take buses or jeepneys in their designated areas…
“You may ask what is the connection of lining up for buses or jeepneys to our economic prosperity? Simple. If we shall line up or take buses or jeepneys in their designated stops, traffic will be eased. Studies show that traffic is a factor which slows down economic output. It is disheartening to note though that we always equate traffic with the number of cars on the road or with the scarcity of well-paved roads. We do not see the connection of traffic and discipline.”
From cyberspace again, a certain Katie Torres, age 30, born after the declaration of martial law in 1972, wrote in 2005 in her blog entitled Katie vs. the Philippines:
“There is no more curfew and we can go wherever we want whenever we want, but we probably won't do that because the streets are not safe. We don't practice military discipline among pedestrians anymore, but this has been used as an excuse for people to violate even the simplest traffic law.”
Posted by Katie at Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Yes, the bottom line in success in any human endeavor is discipline.
I therefore urge a revival of the spirit of “SA IKAUUNLAD NG BAYAN, DISIPLINA ANG KAILANGAN.”
This slogan has no ideology. Discipline is apolitical. We have all been daily victims of our fractured society because of the problem of lack of discipline.
Compare us with our neighbors: Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam…. we are the most undisciplined society in this part of Asia!
We must take drastic action now.
If I had my way, we should establish six ZONES OF DISCIPLINE as a bold start.
1. My first proposed Zone of Discipline is the House of Representatives. We in Congress should lead in discipline by starting our sessions promptly at 4 p.m. with a roll call instead of frequently deferring roll calls.
2. Another proposed Zone of Discipline is EDSA, the country’s longest and most visible avenue. It should be made a show window of traffic order and discipline. We have enough traffic laws and enough law enforcers along the way to do this and enough police generals to make sure this is done. As Aquinas said, erring and wayward drivers should “be restrained… by force and fear” the way it is done in most of the modern world. And EDSA can be replicated in all major avenues nationwide.
3. The next proposed Zone of Discipline is the transport sector. All public transport services… ships, ferries, buses, trains, planes… should be on time… to the minute! It can be done with a more activist, militant Department of Transportation and Communications and its field enforcers ready to suspend or revoke certificates of public convenience of erring public utility operators.
4. The fourth proposed Zone of Discipline is the bureaucracy. All government offices must observe punctuality and courtesy and the full force of the law must be applied to violators.
5. The fifth proposed Zone of Discipline is cleanliness. Littering in public places like streets and parks and improper throwing of garbage should be severely punished. There are enough ordinances and law enforcers to achieve this.
6. And finally, our schools should be the sixth proposed Zone of Discipline. Let us go back to the old-fashioned value of respect for parents, elders and authority. Our educational institutions should perform their constitutionally mandated duty to “develop moral character and personal discipline” among the youth.
Those are just starters and, from my experience as postmaster general, as a cabinet member and as a business executive, I believe they are all doable.
There is no need to craft new laws.
By accomplishing them, our nation can make a big leap. The new spirit will certainly spill over factories, farms and other production centers. Instead of the twenty years that the President said in her SONA it would take us to reach First World status, perhaps it would take us only ten years, well within the foreseeable future.
I would like to end by again quoting Diosdado Lopega, that ordinary Filipino social worker based in Taiwan:
“We are ignoring these simple things and we seem not to realize the good result if we shall practice such routine. How about doing it now?
“Anyway, it is clear then that economic prosperity will end such misnomers for the Philippines as ‘The Sick Man of Asia.’ Most importantly, if we attain economic prosperity, we will no longer be going overseas for jobs. By that time, we shall regain our human worth and dignity.”
Thank you and Mabuhay ang Pilipinas!

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