Potemkin

All our friends are coming to town!

Sadly, they will not be seeing our country. Our government has seen to that – at great expense.

What they will see is the official facsimile of it. Completely sanitized. Tarpaulins concealing slums lining the river banks.

They will not even be seeing a country at work. A holiday has been abruptly declared to clear the normally congested streets.

Special lanes have been designated so that attendees to the ASEAN Summit will not have to mingle with our normally harassed and exhausted commuters. Small businesses around the summit venue have been closed days ahead, incurring tremendous business losses. The whole economy is losing even more productivity because of the arbitrarily imposed holidays.

The visitors will be spending all their time in the finely manicured venue areas. The Marcos Jr. administration is spending P22.9 billion for this extravaganza. That compares with the P1 billion allotted for the summit in 2006 during the Macapagal-Arroyo administration and the P3.79 billion set aside by the Duterte administration.

We might not have counterpart funding for the large projects such as the North-South Commuter Railway. But for the short-lived ASEAN extravaganza, all the stops have been pulled. Nothing makes Marcos Jr. happier than an expensive bash.

The constantly combative Palace mouthpiece tries to convince our people that the ugly tarpaulins put up to block the casual visitor’s view of slum areas are actually opportunities to showcase Filipino art. Her cynicism overwhelms her. Our visitors who will zip by the embarrassing tarpaulins will have no chance to admire the brushwork or the exquisite lighting of the paintings reproduced digitally for this obvious cover-up.

Our visitors will have no opportunity to appreciate Mega Manila for what it is: a brutal urban tangle populated by victims of corruption. An irresponsible political elite never cared about building a city that nurtured its people. All the public works were done to facilitate looting.

What we have is a city without an accessible public health care system and a properly functioning mass transport infrastructure. It is a congested asphalt jungle with scarce publicly available green spaces. It is an unplanned urban sprawl because the state has always been weak. This is why pedestrians are condemned to walk the streets while peddlers occupy the sidewalks.

Nor will the visitors hear what our people want to say. A massive police force of 19,000 has been assembled to keep the population away. Any possible protest action will be contained way beyond earshot for the delegates.

The entire obsessive effort to limit what visitors will see or hear over the next few days calls to mind the story, probably apocryphal, of the Potemkin villages.

Grigory Potemkin, a military commander and rumored lover of Cathrine the Great, was said to have built portable villages moved along the empress’ route when she decided to visit Crimea in 1787. The faux villages were manned by Pontemkin’s own soldiers playacting as happy peasants to conceal the very real misery of the population.

The whole ploy must have required great expense. And all for self-deception. Empress Cathrine was spared the discomfort of seeing malnourished peasants eking a living on the banks of the Dniepier river. The illusion of a happy and healthy population was conserved by moving the facades of what appeared like prosperous villages to occupy the empress’ line of sight.

Nothing was achieved by this costly exercise of deception except the ruler’s perception that she presided over a happy and healthy people. The reality of grinding poverty was kept from Cathrine’s full appreciation. It would take over a century for that grinding poverty to explode in a social revolution that resulted in extermination of the callous aristocracy.

What exactly do we want to achieve by curating and censoring what the visitors may see during the course of ASEAN Summit?

Are we trying to deceive our visitors by pretending to be a prosperous country with a happy and contended population?

Our visitors for this pageant of summitry are our closest neighbors. They know pretty well that the Philippines is the region’s worst performing economy. They know pretty well that we have returned to our old role as the Sick Man of Asia. They know our domestic economy is stumbling because of a massive public works scandal that has yet to be decisively confronted.

We need the support of our partners in the ASEAN. We will not get that support by inveigling them with brilliant folk dances and masterly works of art cheaply reproduced on unsightly tarpaulins. We will not achieve an honest regional dialogue by restricting what our visitors will see while they are here.

Of course we want to put our best foot forward. That could have been achieved by scheduling the activities related to the summit in a safe or contained area like Clark or, as we did before, pushing the summit out to a more pleasant resort like Mactan. Or, politically inconvenient as it may be, to the more spacious Davao City.

Anywhere other than the grimy, congested and flood-infested Metro Manila area. We could have spent more time investing in upgrading our capital city, building the people-centered infrastructure we so direly need, without closing down the nerve center of our national economy.

The massive cover-up of what Manila really is leaves no lasting improvement.