Pitying GMA’s successor

I pity President Macapagal-Arroyo’s successor. If, in truth, GMA has been re-elected, then it’s her we should pity. For she’s inheriting a bankrupt government.

Just look at our horrendous P4.063 trillion debt – as of last December. Half of the government’s foreign debt is in the form of direct obligations which amounted to P815.9 billion in December 2003, up from P704 billion in 2002. These were obligations incurred during the three and a half years of GMA’s presidency.

Then there are the horrible losses of the government-run National Power Corp. (NAPOCOR), the latest being over P115 billion in the past year. On my Impact 2004 final episode, in which GMA rendered a truly stellar performance, La Presidenta tried once again (as she did during our Cebu interview) to sidestep responsibility by declaring she had inherited a bankrupt NAPOCOR.

The fact is that the immense multibillion-peso losses were incurred during her watch. The NAPOCOR continues selling electricity at an immense loss. In the Administration’s "pro-poor" fanaticism, the energy firm goes on charging unrealistically and ruinously (a runaway form of state "subsidy"). In Luzon, NAPOCOR charges P2.22 per kilowatt hour, when the actual cost of power generation is P3.01 per KWH. In the Visayas, the charge is P2.10 per KWH, when the actual generation cost is P2.35. In Mindanao, the charge is P1.04, when generation cost per KWH is P1.45.

That sort of arithmetic doesn’t add up, and will never add up. It plunges the government firm to further ruination. The NAPOCOR’s cash needs could soar to more than P100 billion in 2004. Where will the government get the money?

Remember the unsettling "rotating brownouts" which plagued us and our economy in 1989 to 1993 – the worst of them 12 to 14 hours in duration during the last year of the Cory Administration – thus endowing the former President with the unwanted title of "Queen of Darkness"? Why, unless GMA and her Energy Secretary Vince Perez acknowledge there’s a looming power crisis – which Perez thus far is denying (is he headed for the portfolio of Finance?) – then GMA – again the caveat is "if confirmed by election canvass" – will become known as La Emperadora of Darkness, Part II. I kid thee not.

Despite Vince’s enthusiastic pronouncements about "wind power" and geothermal generation, new projects have slowed to a trickle as the "demand/supply gap" tightens. Unless this government discards political jingoism and faces reality, and moves to fast track the construction of new power plans (many of the existing ones are growing obsolescent), the vicious cycle of power crises will be resumed.

The first of the terrible "rotating brownouts", unless remedies are swiftly taken, will begin occurring in the year 2007. This is sooner than it looks. Moreover, the mounting cost of electric power will scare off any potential investors.

I submit that the government must have the political will to act now. Not bury its head in the sand like an ostrich, hoping the "problem" will go away. It won’t. It will deepen.

* * *

I believe another problem which was left out of the President’s "six priorities" is our nation’s runaway population growth. I brought this question up in Malacañang last Friday night.

What’s our population today? About 84 million – and counting. As the almost hackneyed bromide goes "the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting babies". With the apologies to our Roman Catholic Church’s injunction that we must propagate the Faithful, along with propagating the Faith, it’s time we took resolute steps to curb production in our Baby Factories. (And I don’t mean, of course, abortion which is murder. There are more salutary birth control methods, even though the Pope frowns on the condom.)

I’m a collector of old books and old magazines, and recently I acquired a stack of wartime and immediate post-war copies of The National Geographic Magazine. In a March 1945 issue was not only a map of the Philippines, but a fascinating article by Frederick Simpich entitled, What Luzon Means to Uncle Sam.

Just as National Geographic correspondents and photographers were "embedded" with the US forces in the Iraq war, that magazine’s correspondents and editors covered the Pacific War and the war in Europe, just like the combat journalist-lensmen of TIME, NEWSWEEK, LIFE, The New York Times, and Yank.

In the same issue were pieces headlined, "8th Air Force in England," "Battleship Missouri Comes of Age," "Northern Italy: Scenic Battleground," and "Return to Florence."

Simpich’s article begins with, "Now that our forces are back on Luzon, its strategic importance to America increases as our fight against Japan mounts in fury."

An interesting paragraph, apropos to today’s situation if you ask me, says: In whatever direction our land forces move, whether against Formosa (Taiwan), the China Coast, or the island empire of Hirohito (Japan), Luzon must stand as a powerful bastion on that far-Pacific frontier with which, for better or worse, destiny now links us."

What’s striking is the next line which describes Luzon as "big as Kentucky . . . and with hosts of skilled workers among its 7,375,000 people (about 45 percent of the population of the Philippines...).

Can you beat that? In the year 1945, the population of the island of Luzon was only 7.3 million!

On the following page (322), the National Geographic reveals that the population of the Philippines, meaning our entire archipelago, was just 16 million.

Today, with the population of Metro Manila alone nearing 14 million, what can we say of our population explosion which, year by year, wipes out all of our economic gains?

* * *

It was an old friend – who left his heart in Manila (not San Francisco) – who rang me up yesterday to tell me the "breaking news", Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador Mohammed Saleh al Gamdi, now based in New Delhi, said that the victorious Congress Party’s formally elected leader, Sonia Gandhi, might be having second thoughts about assuming the country’s Prime Ministership – which is just within her grasp.

Brother al-Ghamdi’s real reason for calling, naturally, was to inform me that he’s coming "home" to Manila for a one-month vacation in mid-June, which is surely good news to his many friends here, where he was for many years one of the most popular Ambassadors.

In any event, we’ll know by the time this newspaper hits the streets whether the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi (as she richly deserves for having held the National Congress Party together all these years, in memory of her slain husband, the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi) took the helm in parliament, or decided to pass the sceptre on to one of her "more Indian" – if this is possible – colleagues.

I would have said: Go for it, Sonia! You’re a true Indian, heart and soul! But who listens to Ilocanos in New Delhi anyway, although we saluyots often have the same complexion?

The Congress Party, indeed, has taken over teeming India’s government, after it sweepingly (and surprisingly) upset the former ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu nationalist party in the election finals last Thursday. The pundits did not see this triumph for the Congress party and its allies coming. Perhaps the electorate had merely decided to spank the BJP, but the tidal wave engulfed the Hindu Nationalists – and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vaypayee resigned immediately. (What should put us to shame is the fact that the Indian people knew the results within hours after the final polls closed – it had been a staggered four-stage balloting, covering two weeks, in that vast subcontinent. (If you’ll note, the previously ruling BJP surrendered control at once, without much ek-ek or protest).

Now, however, the Congress Party faces the dilemma of taking power. Vajpayee – whom we met in New Delhi three years ago, during our International Press Institute world congress – had presided over a period of unparalleled progress, raising $4 billion in privatization revenues in the past 18 months. Now, with uncertainty over the new reigning party’s intentions, and its need to seek support from the Communist and Marxist parties, the stock index plunged by almost 12 percent! (The benchmark Sensex index plunged dismayingly.)

The Congress Party (which used to be known as the Congress Party-Indira after Sonia’s late mother-in-law) had won 145 seats, a stunning achievement, but it needed 272 seats in the Lok Sabha to form a government. It had to enlist a coalition from a raft of other parties, including the large Communist group of parties, which had racked up 62 seats. What role the Communists (Marxists) would play is what has spooked the markets, I suppose.

As for Sonia, who had made India her home when she married Rajiv, the elder son of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, she went into politics to carry on her husband’s legacy, when he was assassinated in 1991 by a fanatical Tamil suicide-bomber. A woman had walked up to him and blew herself up.

As the Financial Times reporter Edward Luce described the scene a few days ago, "one of India’s largest election rallies" had taken place in Chennai a week ago. Speaking before a crowd of 50,000, "speaking in English, as Hindi is not widely spoken in India’s southern states – Mrs. Gandhi reminded Indians that her husband Rajiv was assassinated just 25 miles away . . ." Mrs. Gandhi had thumbed the podium emphatically and stated: "I stand here on the soil that is mingled with the blood of my husband, and I can assert that there would be no greater honor than to share his fate for the sake of our country."

Some Indians, "even moderate commentators", have been dismissing Sonia Gandhi as just "an Italian housewife", but Luce noted that "none of this ultimately mattered to the voters. Two-thirds of India’s electorate live in villages and many would go to great lengths to get a job in the city as drivers and cooks." Alas, while Vajpayee was loftily talking about the stock market, foreign exchange reserves and economic growth, Sonia hammered away at the question of jobs and electricity. "Ironically it was she who was quietly talking in a language people could understand."

What’s more, her two children, Priyanka and Rahul, were handily elected to parliament by the rural voters of Uttar Pradesh.

* * *

I met Sonia Gandhi only once, and very briefly, when I was covering the December 1984 elections – which fell on Christmas week – in which her husband Rajiv was running for re-election as Prime Minister.

It was a bitter campaign, and the charges most repeated against Rajiv Gandhi by his political foes (he had become India’s eighth Prime Minister only hours after his mother Indira’s assassination on October 31, 1984) where those of youth and "inexperience." Rajiv at the time was only 40, when he had, after mom was murdered by her own Sikh military bodyguards, become India’s eighth Prime Minister. He was neither a lawyer nor as professor. He was – would you believe? – an airline pilot!

One of his critics had zeroed in on the fact that his late brother Sanjay Gandhi (who died in a crash of his own private plane) had been the one who had been groomed and blooded in politics. Rajiv, on the other hand, had been trained to fly only airplanes – he had been working for Indian Airlines. "Running a country," the critic scoffed, "is very different from flying an airplane."

Indeed, I got a glimpse of Rajiv’s political inexperience in the stray fact that he – stumping five different cities from New Delhi to Benares (where the sacred Ganges flows) – he delivered almost the same speech. But Rajiv came across to the Indian population like a breath of fresh air in the fetid atmosphere of the decayed and cynical politics of an India which had stagnated under the heavy hand of his late mother’s and grandfather’s (Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s) political control.

When 360 million Indians trooped to the polls in two days of elections, Rajiv was handily re-elected. Although his administration was marred, in a sense, by the Bofors Scandal, Rajiv proved decisive, where his mother had been slow in making decisions, preferring to sit down on problems, for all her talent and strength of will, or where grandfather Nehru had temporized with his upper-class cronies.

I had interviewed the brilliant, imperious Nehru in Tin Murti during the months of bleak disappointment that followed the Ladakh "invasion" in which Chinese forces had overwhelmed and captured an inept Indian Army, and seen the shadow of impending death already on his face. It was then, too, that I had first met Indira, who had been her father’s secretary. This great clan turned out to be a dynastic family – plagued by tragedy.

And now, Sonia is in "command". I think the Financial Times said it all. It concluded its piece on her with the words: "It is very hard to govern India."