Book Review: Kapoor and Villa

The examples come mostly from India and the writing is clearly popular, but serious marketing managers can still learn quite a lot from 24 Brand Mantras: Finding a Place in the Minds and Hearts of Consumers by Jagdeep Kapoor (New Delhi: Response Books, 2001, 111 pages).

Kapoor, who manages a leading strategic marketing consultancy in India, uses his own experience with various brands to put across several traditional, as well as innovative, ideas about handling a brand. He uses the usual marketing jargon, such as segmentation, positioning, advertising, promotion, sales distribution, product portfolio design, pricing, and customer service, but by and large, he is able to describe complex marketing realities in words so simple you can read the book while waiting for websites to download when you are surfing.

He has twelve mantras or sayings for the mind and twelve for the heart, both mind and heart being involved in any marketing strategy.

For the mind, he has mantras such as “To build a big brand, adopt a short brand name,” “Sample to sell ample,” and “Brands must make profit, not only noise.” For the heart, he has mantras such as “Be humble, or you will tumble,” “Don’t sell the right product to the wrong audience,” and “Don’t prejudge your consumers.”

He does have a few examples that are not Indian. To stress that “Brand images are fragile, handle with care,” he discusses the Pepsi multiple winners case. Interestingly, he looks at the case in the context of other countries: “The brand took such a beating that the Philippine government had to step in and diffuse the situation. Naturally, repercussions were felt in the neighboring countries as well. While adept handling of the brand saved the day in countries around, in the Philippine islands the Pepsi brand, that had for so many years been lovingly built, stands tarnished.” This was, of course, before Pepsi added a twist to their product.

Some of Kapoor’s insights may seem too simplistic to the seasoned marketing specialist, but for those just starting out to create a name and a fortune for themselves in the marketing field, it will not hurt to heed the 24 pieces of advice he gives.

In the literary field, a brand that has remained strong through the years is the name Jose Garcia Villa. The brand is so strong that the person was even named a National Artist, despite his living most of his adult life in New York City.

One objection to Villa as a brand is his supposedly meager output as a writer. His collected poems will not fill a respectably-sized library volume, though the quality of his poetry is universally acknowledged. Still, in a consumer-oriented society, even in academic circles, quantity is quality, and the brand needed refurbishing.

Jonathan Chua has added to the appeal of the brand by putting together a sizable volume of Villa’s literary criticism – The Critical Villa: Essays in Literary Criticism by Jose Garcia Villa (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2002, 349 pages).

Villa inspired me to do my own listing of the best poems and short stories published in Philippine magazines, but he was more courageous and more brutal, because he put asterisks to indicate what he thought was the quality, or lack of it, of the poems and short stories.

If the poem or short story was not even deserving of an asterisk, he did not even mention it, or worse, he included it in what he called a “Criminal Record” of “The Worst Compositions.” From 1927 to 1940 he made writers in his Honor Roll feel that they had arrived, and he made writers in his Criminal Record feel that they would never arrive. Curiously, a writer could be in both, being praised one year for having “a mind that has risen to the wisdom of the heart” and being condemned another year for writing a text that was “mediocrity triumphant”!

Here are a couple of quotable quotes from Villa’s prose. Villa was particularly incensed by another annual selector, Cornelio Faigao. Said Villa: “I am harsh against Faigao because I don’t like bad taste.” Villa was merciless about writers he disliked, such as Rafael Zulueta da Costa. He wrote, after Zulueta had won the Commonwealth Prize for poetry, “Mr. Zulueta has no talent whatsoever, not even a trace of it. He has not produced one respectable poem in fifteen years of writing.” Villa was gung-ho in general about Philippine writing, however, proclaiming its virtues to high heaven – heaven at that time being the United States – and insisting that Filipinos were as good, if not better, than American writers.

I am particularly grateful that this book has seen the light of day, because my classes in Philippine literary criticism, which usually start with Jose Rizal and, in the period Villa was prolific as a critic, continue only with Alejandro Abadilla, Clodualdo del Mundo, Salvador P. Lopez, and Buenaventura Rodriguez, will now be comprehensive, with the inclusion of Villa in the canon of Filipino literary criticism. If T. S. Eliot is right that every new text changes all previously existing texts, the publication of The Critical Villa will force us to rethink the history of literary criticism, not just in our country, but in the world.

(First published in BizNews Asia, 24-31 March 2003)

Book Review: Sanchez & Mojares

The grammar is atrocious, the relationship between texts and visuals unclear, and the printing amateurish, but some of the pieces of advice in Marlo Sanchez’s Best Advice for Your Own Business (Muntinlupa: Pinoybisnes Resource Center, 2002, 245 pages) should be useful to the office employee who wants to make it big in the world of entrepreneurs.

Sanchez comes from a rare breed – the breed of Filipino bestselling authors. Appropriately enough, publishing his own books is his own business, and he unselfishly shares with his readers the secrets of his success as an entrepreneur and an independent publisher. The nuggets of practical wisdom in his books are enough to start off anyone seriously thinking of becoming rich.

Unlike his previous Be Smart! Start & Manage Your Own Business and A Smart & Practical Guide for New Entrepreneurs, this latest Sanchez product features cartoons by another well-known figure, Washington “Tonton” Young, creator of Pupung. Young is himself another entrepreneur, managing a small eatery very much like the one featured in his cartoons.

The book is highly recommended for those dreaming, but still afraid, of starting their own business, as well as for Pupung fans.

Much better written and printed is Resil B. Mojares’s Waiting for Mariang Makiling: Essays in Philippine Cultural History (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2002, 324 pages). Mojares has set out to find out how Filipinos in the past imagined their world. Or, if we want to be even more precise, how we Filipinos today imagine our world.

Mojares is the major structuralist or poststructuralist or postmodern critic in this part of the world, yet you will find it hard to spot a structuralist buzzword or a reference to a poststructuralist demigod in his work. Mojares has not indigenized contemporary Western critical theory; instead, he has universalized traditional Filipino critical theory. In his footnotes, you will see a lot of names and texts that are the result of his digging in libraries. But in his text, you will be dazzled by a lot of gold ore that comes not from other people’s books, but only from his sharp and fertile mind.

Imagine an essay that succeeds in tying together Maria Makiling, Bernardo Carpio, Rizal, Ferdinand Marcos, Macario Pineda, Jose F. Lacaba, and our desire to steer our own course as a nation. (The word “nation,” by the way, has a very bad press in Mojares’s book.) Or an essay that finds Pigafetta circumnavigating not the globe but the writing process. Imagine doing with Italian texts on the Philippines what Edward Said thought he did with French texts on the Middle East in Orientalism, and subverting or deconstructing (we should say for the sake of those, who, like Mojares, dislike jargon, debunking) Said’s findings. Imagine reading a history or a biography and concentrating on what is not being said, on the unsaid, the unsaid being the real history or biography, whatever the word “real” means. Imagine treating the process of being hailed as a saint – beatification and canonization – as a text. Imagine following the journey of a physical statue and coming up not with a physical map, but with a map of the mind of the Cebuano. Imagine constructing a genealogy of manners, or even a catechism of the body. Or taking an 1891 menu and forming a portrait of the late 19th century in Cebu.

We could say that all this was done before by Jacques Derrida when he wrote a thick book based only on a postcard he bought on a visit to Oxford or by Roland Barthes when he wrote about women after looking only at printed photographs of women’s dresses. We could say this, but we would be wrong. Mojares has done postmodern readings of various texts much better than Derrida or Barthes, at least for Filipino readers, because we know all the references and do not have to research on who exactly the people and what exactly the texts are being used in a Derrida or Barthes essay.

In fact, in my classes on literary criticism, I hardly ever ask my students to read Derrida or Barthes anymore; I just ask them to read Mojares. They get the theories and the methods and the insights accurately anyway, and they get them much faster and much easier than in wading through often unreliable English translations of often badly-written French texts. True, Mojares shifts from Spanish to English to Tagalog to Cebuano sources with equal facility, and expects readers to share this facility. But frankly, what business do we have doing literary theory, not to mention Philippine history, if we do not know Spanish, English, Tagalog, and yes, Cebuano?

Like Rizal, Mojares never seeks knowledge for its own sake, but always, in his own words, “knowledge at his country’s service.” One way we could read his latest book is to wonder why nothing has changed since the old days, why the Philippines is still as invisible as it was when Rizal vainly looked for Philippine weapons in the otherwise complete Museum of Artillery in Paris, why we insist on betraying our imagination by adopting, or even adapting, foreign signs, significations, and sins.

(First published in BizNews Asia, 7-14 April 2003.)

Book Review: Chen and Manahan

Only 3 percent of Filipinos are Chinese, but these 3 percent control 70 percent of all businesses in the Philippines.

If only for this startling fact, the book Inside Chinese Business: A Guide for Managers Worldwide (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001; reprinted in the Philippines by McGraw Hill) by Professor Ming-Jer Chen of the University of Virginia (formerly director of The Wharton School’s Global Chinese Business Initiative) should be required reading for all persons doing business in the Philippines.

Chen correctly points out that non-Chinese doing business with Chinese firms have to understand Chinese history and culture. For instance, formal organizational charts have little to do with the actual decision-making going on in Chinese firms (which he calls “Chinese business families”). In a Chinese firm, there is an unwritten organizational chart that is followed and respected by everyone in the firm. The person on top might not be the one making the final decisions; it could be a person technically lower in rank or a person not even in the chart at all.

Chen’s being Chinese and American at the same time obviously helps him explain to non-Chinese the foundations of Chinese business behavior. In particular, Chen is good at explaining why Chinese business principles can be traced to family behavior patterns, what guanxi really is (it’s not negative, but positive), and why conflicts occur every day between Chinese and non-Chinese negotiators.

A simple observation tells it all: “Traditional Chinese writing runs from the top of the page to the bottom, while the Western writing system runs from left to right. When Chinese people are reading traditional texts, it looks as though they are nodding their heads and saying ‘Yes, Yes.’ When Westerners are reading, they appear to be shaking their heads and saying ‘No, No.’”

Even in the Chinese language itself, differences can be inferred. The first person pronoun is hardly used in Chinese, for example, compared with English, where “I” dominates most sentences in everyday speech. “Who you know is who you are,” says Chen, and this must look strange to Westerners (that term includes non-Chinese Filipinos, who are all educated to be brown Westerners), who value individuality, identity, and individual freedom.

In fact, Confucius taught that we should know others. Contrast that with Socrates who said, “Know thyself.” Clearly, there is a wide gap between the two ways of thinking about the world and about the world’s business.

Chen’s book is too full of insights to be summarized in a short review, but one thing is certain: it contains enough information and advice to make business with Chinese firms much easier and more profitable. There are, in addition, helpful lists of readings and websites, a glossary of Chinese terms, and even short accounts of Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Sun Tzu.

Similarly helpful, particularly to foreigners who want to take full advantage of their stay in the Philippines, is the award-winning Street-Bound: Manila on Foot (Anvil Publishing, 2001) by Josefina P. Manahan. The book won last year’s National Book Award for Best Design.

Street-Bound: Manila on Foot describes itself as a “small book,” but it is small only in size. The concept of the design is large, encompassing the choice of the size of its paper, which is small enough to grasped by one hand but large enough to contain all the information the book gives about touring Metro Manila; the choice of fonts, which is pleasant to the eyes tired from seeing tourist spots but still eager to see more; the manner in which the type and the illustrations are set on the pages, which is functional, meant to help the reader shifting eyes from tourist spot to book not to get lost either in walking or in reading.

The book is not only about the city of Manila, but about Metro Manila, or at least those parts of it that are walkable. Among the places one can walk in, for example, are the Ninoy Aquino Parks and Wildlife Center, Quezon Memorial Park, and the tiangge in Greenhills. These offer, as the other places included in the book also do, deep pleasure to those who have eyes to see and ears to listen.

The book has basically four kinds of walking tours, which are not necessarily distinct from each other: nature, historical, cultural, and shopping. Walking around Intramuros, for example, offers one a taste of history and culture, but there is some good and bargain shopping in the area. In fact, Manahan fails to mention that Intramuros even offers a taste of nature, in the sense that trees and wide lawns are rare sights in polluted Manila.

Manahan has a keen sense of observation, and a writing talent that is equal to that sense. For example, here is how she describes walking into Paco Park: “As you enter the inner circle of Paco Park through a fine neoclassic stone archway, take note of two small fountains flanking it: fluted columns surmounted by a lion’s head.”
Tourist books are almost always for tourists only, but Manahan’s book should be useful and delightful even to the native Manileño. Natives do not always appreciate the beauty around them.

(First published in BizNews Asia, 17-24 March 2003)

Book Review: Drucker and Gonzalez

Friedrich Nietzsche said that “the last Christian died on the cross.” On his deathbed, Karl Marx said, “I am not a Marxist.” Sigmund Freud obviously turns in his grave every time a Freudian denies that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Jesus Christ, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud are three of only a handful of people that have totally changed human history. They share a common fate: their successors rarely quote them accurately.

Peter Drucker has to be included in that august company of history changers. Unlike them, however, he has lived to see how great minds are always misinterpreted. Although he invented management in his seminal book The Practice of Management (1954), it has become unfashionable to quote him in management schools, but when he is quoted, he is almost always quoted wrongly.

For example, Drucker describes management as an art, rather than a science, yet his followers insist that there is a science of management.

Drucker is uncomfortable with Management by Objectives as it is commonly understood, yet that technique is always attributed to him. In fact, in his book Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999), Drucker uses the word “results” rather than “objectives.”

Fortunately for him, management guru Robert Heller has outlined Drucker’s main ideas in the Business Masterminds book Peter Drucker (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2000). Heller does a fine job of putting into 112 pages the ideas expounded by Drucker in more than 30 books. In Heller’s book can be found capsule summaries of Drucker’s key terms, such as customer focus, decentralization, empowerment, knowledge worker, and theory of the business.

In addition, Heller makes his book not only a study of Drucker, but also a management handbook. Heller boils down Drucker’s insights into bullets that translate “ideas into action,” such as, “If the business is growing fast, question your assumptions all over again.”

On the local front, a case study of Drucker in action can be found in Andrew Gonzalez’s An Unfinished Symphony: 934 Days at DECS (Manila, 2002). Gonzalez does not cite Drucker, but it is obvious from the way he headed the Department of Education, Culture, and Sports (DECS) from July 1998 to January 2001 that Druckerian principles contributed to the efficient running of the country’s biggest organization (consisting of half a million people, with more than 15 million customers, i.e., students).

Gonzalez’s book does not only reveal how difficult (yet possible) it is to manage a bureaucratic and corrupt organization, but also provides horror stories about politicians interfering with management. It is hard enough trying to save the losing proposition that is the public educational system (which does not have enough capital nor human resources to serve its customers), but the task is made almost impossible when all the petty politicians sitting in Congress or in Malacañang think that they know better about education than educators themselves.

Clearly because he is afraid of libel suits, Gonzalez does not obviously point a finger at anyone identifiable, but experienced government watchers should be able to read between the lines. Alert and informed readers will even realize that, sad to say, some of the villains during Gonzalez’s time still lurk in the shadows of the education department.

The management problems Gonzalez faced in a government organization can doubtless be found also in private corporations. How he coped with these problems should help other managers through their own private or public hells.

If it is true, as Drucker says, that “it is vision and moral responsibility that, in the last analysis, define the manager,” Gonzalez was, at DECS, the model manager. Too bad morally irresponsible politicians won in the end.

By the way, Drucker and Gonzalez have something else in common, besides being management experts: they both have literary backgrounds. Drucker has written two novels, and Gonzalez took graduate studies in literature. Maybe this is why both see management as an art, rather than a science.

(First published in BizNews Asia, 3-17 March 2003.)

Open Letter to the Philippine Development Forum 2008

From Former Senior Government Officials (FSGO)

As Filipinos who have served in senior positions of our government, we acknowledge with appreciation and gratitude the resources, knowledge and good will extended to our country by the international community. The Philippine Development Forum is an important platform for dialogue between leaders of our country and representatives of the international donor community about issues critical to Philippine development. We have no desire to disrupt your discussions nor hijack your agenda. We only wish to bring to your attention a matter that we believe requires your serious consideration.

For more than six months now, since September 2007, the Senate of the Republic of the Philippines has been investigating a public investment project of our government (National Broadband Network project) that was to be executed by a supplier (ZTE Corporation) and financed by a loan from the government of the People’s Republic of China. The media has called this the “NBN-ZTE deal,” or more often, the “NBN-ZTE scandal.”

Details that have emerged from the Senate investigations are disturbing. Alleged bribery in amounts of more than $130 million. Unexplained reversals of declared policies established by the NEDAICC process. Reported influence of politically connected private persons who are outside the chain of official decision-making. Possible crimes from kidnapping to bribery in attempts to prevent witnesses from testifying. Most disturbing of all, possible involvement of the President of the Philippines in corruption and coverup.

The President had authorized members of her Cabinet to negotiate and conclude the NBNZTE deal despite knowledge of possible anomalies. As details of these anomalies became public from the Senate investigation, the President cancelled the deal in October 2007. Despite the Philippine Senate serving as the only credible democratic institution seeking to uncover the truth about this scandal, the President has continued to impede and undermine its investigation of the cancelled deal.

Months after canceling the tainted deal, the President has still not taken any action herself to establish responsibility for any irregularities that may have occurred, nor has she taken any other action to hold any person in her Cabinet accountable for the international embarrassment and civil disturbance that this scandal has already brought to our country. She stands in the eyes of our people as a suspected plunderer, yet she has not acted to promptly bring out the facts that will clear up all doubts.

It seems to us that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is using her powers with impunity stave off the unmasking of her participation in the scandal. She has thus lost all credibility in fighting corruption, credibility that had already been eroded by her involvement in other unresolved scandals from election cheating to a fertilizer scam to bribery in Malacanang, among others.

We have therefore concluded that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is at the center of corruption and coverup in the NBN-ZTE scandal. Others may not agree with us, and we are open to be proven wrong. We ask those who agree with us, as well as those who think otherwise, to work together to determine responsibility for corruption in this deal, hold accountable those who are responsible, and devise measures to avoid recurrence.

Why is this important to PDF? This is about corruption, which sucks scarce resources crucial to development that benefits the poor, and which erodes public trust and destroys national unity essential to sustainable development. This is about corruption on a very large scale, with alleged $130 million bribes dwarfing costs of many projects financed by donors. This is about corruption within the NEDA-ICC process through which many donor-assisted projects have also been approved. And most important of all, this is about corruption, which may involve the President who is the principal with whom almost all country programs of assistance to the Philippines nominally relate. In the words of Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics and former World Bank Chief Economist, “Smaller scale corruption is bad, but systemic corruption of political processes can have even greater costs.”

We call on the PDF to examine the NBN-ZTE scandal as a possible example of “systemic corruption of political processes.” We make the following suggestions for the dialogue among PDF partners this year:

* We ask our colleagues who represent our government and our country to explain to the international community why has the President not cooperated fully with the Senate in investigating a deal that she has in fact cancelled as anomalous in October 2007? Why has no one in the administration shown acceptance of responsibility for the damage and disturbance that this scandal has caused? Why has there been no resignation, suspension, or dismissal of anyone officially involved with the cancelled NBN project?

* We also ask our colleagues in the international donor community to consider how the integrity and effectiveness of their assistance programs to the Philippines could be affected if corruption at scale and level of the NBN-ZTE scandal remains unresolved? How could the prestige, credibility and leverage of the donor community be constructively mobilized to help Philippine democratic institutions resolve this scandal? How urgent is it for the President to demonstrate with actions her declared intention to get at the truth and hold those accountable for any corruption in the NBN-ZTE deal?

We must all be disturbed by how weak are Philippine democratic institutions in fighting corruption that is so brazen, so obviously harmful and so clearly destroys public trust in government. Leaving such an awful mess as the NBN-ZTE scandal hanging unresolved and inconclusive can only fuel widespread anger, despair, hopelessness and alienation.

There is a rising tide of public disgust over an administration that remains deaf to calls for major reforms, chooses to be blind to worsening hunger and poverty in our communities, and refuses to acknowledge the corruption driving this deafness and blindness to the common good.

The PDF has already contributed to bringing the issue of corruption into the mainstream of priority development concerns. The PDF has also opened the way for civil society organizations to participate in oversight over procurement, financial management and monitoring of development projects, as a concrete measure to increase transparency and accountability. We are hopeful that the PDF can open a new and positive channel for constructive dialogue on addressing corruption of political processes that is central to strengthening the Philippine institutions to which many of us have devoted so much of our lives and careers.

Signed:
Former Members of the Cabinet, The Diplomatic Corp of Officers,
and Heads of Constitutional Bodies
Florencio Abad, former Secretary, Department of Education
Rafael Alunan III, former Secretary, Department of The Interior and Local Government
Senen Bacani, former Secretary, Department of Agriculture
Angelito Banayo, former Presidential Adviser on Political Affairs
Ramon Cardenas, former Head, Presidential Management Staff
Karina Constantino David, former Chair, Civil Service Commission
Edilberto de Jesus, former Secretary, Department of Education
Albert del Rosario, former Ambassador to the United States of America
Ramon Del Rosario, Jr., former Secretary, Department of Finance
Teresita Quintos Deles, former Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process
Benjamin Diokno, former Secretary, Department of Budget and Management
Narcisa Escaler, former Ambassador to the United Nations
Jesus Estanislao, former Secretary, Department of Finance
Fulgencio Factoran, Jr., former Secretary, Department of Environment and Natural
Resources
Victoria Garchitorena, former Head, Presidential Management Staff
Marietta Goco, former Chair, Presidential Commission to Fight Poverty
Philip Ella Juico, former Secretary, Department of Agrarian Reform
Lina Laigo, former Secretary, Department of Social Welfare and Development
Ernest Leung, former Secretary, Department of Finance
Josefina Lichauco, former Secretary, Department of Transportation and Communication
Narzalina Lim, former Secretary, Department of Tourism
Felipe Medalla, former Director General, National Economic Development Authority
Imelda Nicolas, former Lead Convenor, National Anti-Poverty Commission
Cayetano Paderanga, former Director General, National Economic Development Authority
Cesar Purisima, former Secretary, Department of Finance
Victor Ramos, former Secretary, Department of Environment and Natural Resources
Amina Rasul, former Presidential Adviser and Concurrent Chair, National Youth Commission
Rodolfo Reyes, former Press Secretary
Juan Santos, former Secretary, Department of Trade and Industry
Cesar Sarino, former Secretary, Department of The Interior and Local Government
Corazon Juliano Soliman, former Secretary, Department of Social Welfare and Development
Jaime Galvez Tan, former Secretary, Department of Health
Rene Villa, former Secretary, Department of Agrarian Reform
Veronica Villavicencio, former Lead Convenor, National AntiPoverty
Commission

Former Heads of Government Finance Institutions and GovernmentOwned
and Controlled Corporations
Leonor Briones, former National Treasurer
Jose Cuisia, Jr., former Governor, Central Bank of the Philippines
Francisco Del Rosario, former Chair, Development Bank of the Philippines
Evangeline Escobillo, former Commissioner, Insurance Commission
Vitaliano Nañagas II, former Chair, Development Bank of the Philippines
Norberto Nazareno, former President, Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation
Ricardo Mirasol Tan, former President, Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation
Deogracias Vistan, former President, Land Bank of the Philippines

Former Undersecretaries and Heads of Attached Agencies
Tomas Africa, former Administrator, National Statistics Office
Roberto Ansaldo, former Undersecretary, Department of Agriculture
Gerardo Bulatao, former Undersecretary, Department of Agrarian Reform
Sostenes Campillo, Jr., former Undersecretary, Department of Tourism
Isagani Cruz, former Undersecretary, Department of Education
Guillermo Cunanan, former General Manager, Manila Airport Authority
Edgardo Del Fonso, former Undersecretary, Department of Finance
Quintin Doromal, former Commissioner, Presidential Commission on Good Government
Jose Luis Gascon, former Undersecretary, Department of Education
Milwida Guevara, former Undersecretary, Department of Finance
Juan Miguel Luz, former Undersecretary, Department of Education
Jose Molano, Jr., former Executive Director, Commission on Filipinos Overseas
Conrado Navarro, former Undersecretary, Department of Agrarian Reform
Victor Ordoñez, Former Undersecretary, Department of Education
Walfrido Reyes, former Undersecretary, Department of Tourism
Melito Salazar, Jr., former Undersecretary, Department of Trade and Industry
Antonio Salvador, former Undersecretary, Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process
Leticia Ramos Shahani, former Undersecretary, Department of Foreign Affairs
Mario Taguiwalo, former Undersecretary, Department of Health
V. Bruce Tolentino, former Undersecretary, Department of Agriculture

Imagining Gloria Arroyo

One of the exercises I do in my playwriting classes when I want to help my students create a character goes like this: Imagine yourself as the character and, using the first person pronoun, articulate what you feel and think.

Suppose I were writing a play about Gloria Arroyo, how would I write what is known in the drama trade as a monologue? The following, then, is a purely creative exercise; any resemblance to any living or dead person should be considered purely coincidental.

First of all, if I were Gloria Arroyo, I would never resign. That is simply stupid. I would be immediately hauled into jail by whoever replaces me. Even if the new president only puts me under house arrest in my own condo, that would still be very embarrassing, not to mention inconvenient. That is what happened to Erap. The people wanted Erap’s blood, and I had to give it to them. The people now want my blood, and whoever leads the mob will be just too glad to oblige them.

Secondly, I would never give up the presidency. The same reasons that prevent me now from resigning will still be around in 2010. The next president, even if he or she is the one I anoint, will undoubtedly put me in jail.

I had to put Erap in jail, even if I served him hand and foot as his Vice President. The only thing I could do for him was to pardon him the moment the court convicted him. That way, technically, he never spent a minute in jail. Of course, he did spend all those years not being able to move around, but that’s just a technicality. Technically, he was presumed innocent until proven guilty. As soon as he was proven guilty, I pardoned him. My successor will pardon me, I hope, but how many years will I have to spend imprisoned though presumed innocent?

It is not even a question anymore of my being innocent or guilty. Erap still says he is innocent, but I arrested him anyway. I think I am innocent, or at least I think I have done and continue to do the right thing, but no one seems to agree with me, not even my closest aides, who I cannot trust. In fact, I don’t really know who to trust anymore, since Erap’s closest aides betrayed him. Erap’s betrayers are in my Cabinet, for heaven’s sake. As they say, once a traitor, always a traitor.

I could declare martial law. But the Constitution says I cannot do that without Congress looking over my shoulder. It’s a good thing I have made sure that that fellow is no longer in charge of Congress. I never trusted him, even if he always defended me when I needed defending. He is always only for himself, not for anyone else, least of all me. But there’s still the Senate, and I can’t seem to get through to them. Not yet, anyway.

But I am not sure of this new Speaker either. I thought he was for federalism and a parliamentary system and all that. That is why I picked him. But he now says he is against changing the Constitution. A parliamentary system would have made me immune forever, because I can always be a member of parliament.

On the other hand, where would I run as a candidate? My own provincemates elected that pesky priest as our governor.

I don’t know why I ended up president in the first place. I just wanted to be a teacher. I loved being in a university, where you are judged not by who you know, but by what you know.

The die is cast. I have to bite the bullet. Martial law is the only thing I can do, and I better make sure Congress agrees with me. I don’t really care what the Supreme Court says. I have violated all sorts of laws anyway, but since it takes forever to challenge anything I do in court, I will have plenty of lead time to think things through. And to pack my bags.

They say I already have a place set up in Portugal or some other place where no one can touch me. That may be true, but why would I want to go into exile? I don’t want to die like Marcos did, just an unknown foreigner dying in a foreign land. I don’t want to end up like he did, not even having a proper burial as a former president. I want to be buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, because I am a hero. I saved this country from Erap. That makes me a hero, doesn’t it?

What an ungrateful people these Filipinos are! I have spent my entire life serving them, yet they turn against me just because some of my guys foolishly got caught with their hands in the cookie jar. It’s so hard to get good help these days.

(Published in Philippine Star, 20 March 2008)

Sarap and Lasa

Eat, drink, and be merry, though we’re really starving

“Food, after all,” writes Doreen G. Fernandez, “is primarily for survival,” but you wouldn’t know it if you read Sarap: Essays on Philippine Food (Mr. & Ms. Publishing Company, 1988), a collection of writings by her and Edilberto N. Alegre on why food means a lot more than staving off starvation.

The book brings together Fernandez’s culinary essays (such as her early 1971 “Puto-Bumbong, Bibingka, Salabat, atbp: The Filipino Christmas Table” and her more recent magazine articles) and Alegre’s linguistic studies (such as his 1987 magazine series on “Taste as Language” and “Cooking as Language”). Full of descriptive detail, the essays portray Filipinos as lovers of eating for its own sake (or, at most, for the sake of friendship, family, or religion) and not as a means to get through another day. There are exceptions, of course, such as the Bajaws, for whom “eating becomes only a minor activity.” There is also the Tagalog pantawid gutom or “in-between food,” but even that looks forward to the next meal, not to the next breath. In short, food to Filipinos is far from being primarily for survival.

Because food occupies a central place in our lives, the book is delightful to read. Her disavowal notwithstanding, Fernandez makes us “smell adobo and lechon” (in Nick Joaquin’s words, which she quotes) while we read about where and how she discovered such-and-such a dish. It is not adobo or lechon, of course, that Fernandez identifies as uniquely and definitively Filipino. That distinction is reserved for sinigang. Why sinigang? The answer to that question is precisely the reason her 1975 essay “Why Sinigang?” is now a classic.

Although the two writers are careful to note their separate and independent authorship of the essays, the book is unified by two things they share: they both love to eat, and they both love to talk about language. From street to hotel, from library to kitchen, from North to South, the two authors unselfishly share their culinary discoveries with us. No food is too strange, too exotic, too cheap, or too expensive for the two food detectives.

Similarly, Fernandez and Alegre share a love for language. Their investigations into the history, sociology, and psychology of food invariably begin and often end in the origins and meanings of words. Their etymologies may make older, more traditional linguists uncomfortable, but their intentions are unassailable: they are out to make us extremely proud of our cultural heritage.

Take adobo. The word comes from the Mexican word adobado (a stewed meat dish) and the Spanish word adobo (a pickling sauce). Indigenizing both words and food, we Filipinos now use adobo to refer not only to the basic chicken dish, but to the cooking process itself. We can put it another way: Mexicans have only a dish and Spaniards have only a sauce, but we have a process. One can derive all sorts of sociological insights from this, and the authors do that, not only with adobo, but with every other word for food that they find in Philippine languages.

In matters of food, we Filipinos are never at a loss for words. For rice, for instance, the most important food in our country, we have no less than 160 vernacular words! Fernandez and Alegre do not have the time nor the space to analyze each of these words, but they do try, in several essays, to spell out the implications and meanings that rice has in our culture. Here’s a quick example. One word gives a clue to the richness lying underneath language: the word olam literally means “to be eaten with rice.” The two authors have a lot of fun squaring that meaning with the new ways of eating olam (without rice) in fastfood places.

If Sarap strikes you as too theoretical, since food, if nothing else, is experiential, then try the other new book by this prolific pair of writers, Lasa: A Guide to 100 Restaurants (Urban Food Foundation, 1989). If you think this book is just another guide for tourists who don’t know any better, think again. For one thing, no hotel restaurant is included in the guide, that task having been done much earlier by the Hotel and Restaurant Association in The Dining Guide to Manila’s 50 Best Restaurants. For another thing, these are the same two authors of Sarap, which advises, among other things, that tourists who have “the standard preconceptions and fears” should be left to suffer, blissfully ignorant, in hotels. In other words, just as they challenge readers of Sarap to try out new things, Fernandez and Alegre are out to introduce offbeat places in Lasa.

In Lasa, you’ll find places frequented by taxi drivers (average cost of meal per person: P12 to P25), yuppies (the authors’ witty comment on the dress code: “Shoes required”), new rich (“Jogging pants not allowed inside”), and old rich (“exclusive to members”).

Having been written in September 1988, Lasa now needs some updating. I can’t resist adding some notes from my own experience. Contrary to the authors’ claim that Via Mare Coffee Shop in Greenbelt has “prompt service,” I have found its recent service consistently far from prompt. Grove on Pasay Road is indeed great at lunch, but dinner sometimes finds it serving what may have been lunch. With more tables now, Balaw-Balaw is even better than it used to be, if that’s possible. I miss the Chinese restaurants Gloriamaris, Jade Garden, and China City (the last unfortunately hit by a strike) in the guide, as well as the less expensive Sala Thai (near PWU), the unpretentious Wok Inn (with two branches near Malate Church), and the enduring Za’s Cafe in Ermita.

What obviously has to wait for the next edition are the new Dulcinea in Greenbelt and Becky’s Kitchen for cakes (though they are not, strictly speaking, restaurants), the various places with the word “Sugar” in their names, Kim Anh Vietnamese Restaurant (near Hobbit House on Mabini) with its spring rolls, and if the Dining Guide goes out of print, the hotel places that are exceptions to the general dreariness of hotel food (such as Century Park’s delicatessen and its fabled Coupe Mon Amour, Manila Midtown’s dimsum place, Manila Hotel’s buffet lunches, Silahis’ Italian buffet, and the former Hilton’s Coquilla Glory).

In matters of taste, there can be no dispute, said the ancients, but modern Filipinos know better: food is a matter of personal and national pride and identity, taken as seriously as politics, but much less hypocritically.

BIG PEOPLE IN SMALL JOBS: The government employees assigned to the Promotions Department of the Linangan ng mga Wika ng Pilipinas at the University of Life complex are exceptionally courteous, helpful, and knowledgeable. Similarly credits to their jobs are the drivers of the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Makiling Arts Center. When I was recently stranded in Makiling without a spare fan belt, they brought me back to Manila in the CCP car, had my car repaired, and drove my car to Manila to catch up with me. All that in the driving rain. If our legislators would only take their jobs as conscientiously, we would not be in the fine mess we are in today.

(First published in Starweek, September, 1989)

A Contrary View of Miss Saigon

“It would be a rather irresponsible critic or reviewer,” wrote Fr. Nicasio Cruz, S.J., in his Reel World on September 17, 1988, “who would analyze, say, Scorpio Nights, Ora Pro Nobis or Private Show solely on aesthetic grounds, praising its undeniable (though limited) artistry, without making a further prudential judgment about the possible moral dangers for the viewers.” As a critic and reviewer, I have no wish to appear irresponsible. I shall, therefore, venture into a moral criticism of the much-publicized Miss Saigon.

There is no question about Lea Salonga’s achievement as the lead singer of this new musical at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane near Covent Garden at the heart of London’s West End. She is brilliant as the Vietnamese prostitute who falls in love with an American customer, bears his child, escapes to Bangkok where she continues to ply her trade, and kills herself when he decides to stay with his American wife. She is clearly the best singer in the whole ensemble, even besting Claire Moore (who plays the wife), who starred in The Phantom of the Opera. Beside her, the male singers in the cast all look like neighborhood favorites who failed to make it to the grand national finals of Ang Bagong Kampeon. Looking particularly inept because he has to sing several songs with her is Simon Bowman (who plays the American customer Chris), who starred in Les Miserables. Only male lead Jonathan Pryce (who plays The Engineer, a Vietnamese pimp) gets the same kind of applause at the curtain call. The night I saw it (September 22, 1988), in fact, the loudest applause was reserved for Lea Salonga, who got a standing ovation.

“What a lovely voice,” I heard the British viewers saying after the show. “She is very good,” echoed others. There were very few Filipinos in the Grand Circle that night (I was forced to buy an expensive ticket because there was no other ticket left). It could not be said, therefore, that patriotic feelings clouded our judgement. The cheering after the show for Lea was genuine aesthetic delight, brought about by her talent for singing and acting. Let is not be said that I am taking away from her achievement, which has made her an international theater star.

What bothers me about the production – and it has also bothered a number of British viewers and reviewers, including our own Paul Woods who wrote his review for another newspaper – is the blatant racism, sexism, and bigotry of the production.

First, the racism. All the Vietnamese and Thai characters in the story, whether played by Filipino, Malaysian, Italian, French, Dutch, Japanese, American, or British performers, were the scum of the earth – pimps, prostitutes, bar habitues, sadistic and mindless soldiers, anti-nationalist visa-hunters at embassies. None of the Asian characters had any redeeming human qualities. Even The Engineer (played ingeniously by Pryce) helps Kim (played by Lea Salonga) only because her child is his “passport to America.” In the well-hyped production number “The American Dream,” where an enormous Cadillac slides into the stage from the back, Pryce even dilutes the apparent satiric intent of the song by making it too subtle for the American tourists in the audience.

In contrast to the bad guys who populate Asia, there are the good guys in the United States. In a scene set in Atlanta, the Americans (played by all the nationalities I’ve cited) are portrayed as genuinely concerned about the human rights of the children they have left behind. (Interestingly enough, they are not concerned about the women the men left behind.) Chris’s friend John (played by Peter Polycarpou) is portrayed as an all-around good guy, trying to find a way out for Chris while protecting his son. After all, the son has American blood, making him “better” than the pure-blooded Vietnamese. Ellen the wife is so kind-hearted that she even takes Kim’s son under her wing at the end of the show. What the writers try to satirize in “The American Dream,” they forcefully lionize in the characterization. You can’t get more racist than that.

Sexism is something else. The first scene, meant aesthetically to establish the milieu, is actually meant to titillate the men in the audience. The director and designers recreate the inside of our Ermita joints. There is the raffle where the unlucky prostitute (“Miss Saigon”) is given to the lucky customer. There is endless kissing and pawing, with our Filipina actresses getting effectively mauled on stage. There is the baring of skin. In short, under the pretext that the prostitutes are sex objects for the customers, the show manages to make the actresses sex objects for the audience.

One particular stage business says it all: an actor shakes a beer can in front of his groin, thus giving the appearance of masturbation. Pornography under the guise of art is still pornography. The scene set in Patpong (Bangkok’s answer to our Mabini) repeats the pornography. The lascivious dancing of the actresses is done every night both in Patpong and in Manila (or Quezon City or Cebu or any other place where poverty forces women to prositution). There is only one difference between Theatre Royal Drury Lane and our neighborhood beer garden: it’s considered respectable for a man to bring his wife to the Theatre Royal.

Finally, there is bigotry. No matter what we think of communism, we cannot deny that the Vietnamese fought a war to get rid of foreigners in their own land. Miss Saigon makes it appear that the Vietnamese fought the Americans simply because of Ho Chi Minh’s ego, symbolized by a gigantic statue hoisted up by mindless communist soldiers. We might as well say that the Americans fought the British because Thomas Jefferson and George Washington wanted memorials built in their honor, or that Filipinos fought both the Spaniards and the Americans because we wanted to have a Rizal Park. Racism and sexism are recognized moral evils all over the world, but bigotry is just as much of an immorality.

It is the most ironic twist of all that a musical meant to appeal to an eventual American audience on Broadway has to distort the American ideal. If democracy offers us anything, it is openness to other people’s ideas. A play that says that Asians, women, and communists are not worth taking seriously betrays a narrowness of mind unworthy of Jefferson, Washington, Rizal, Ho Chi Minh, or even Lea Salonga.

(First published in Starweek, January, 1989.)

English Not for Critical Theory

Anvil Publishing has been after me for more than a decade to compile my columns into books. Perhaps one way to force me to do that is to upload as many of my old columns as I can, thus enabling me to revise the columns for book publication, as well as to gauge reader reaction. Here, then, is the first of what should be a series of uploaded, updated old columns.

Why English will not do as our language for critical theory

I was not going to reprint in this column the comments I delivered on July 14, 1989, during the Round-Table on Critical Theory of the Third International Philippine Studies Conference held at the Philippine Social Science Center. Although a number of Starweek’s readers are English teachers, I felt originally that the general reader may find the jargon of literary theorists opaque, if not altogether weird.

On August 28, 1989, however, in another newspaper, Arnold Molina Azurin, in a feature article entitled “Who is storming the Ivory Tower?”, quoted my comments sympathetically at some length. If readers of a feature article can get through jargon, I said to myself, then readers of columns (particularly this column!) should have a chance to find out what I delivered that evening in Quezon City.

Here, then, are substantial portions of my paper, entitled “Deconstructing English as a Language for Philippine Theory.” Judge for yourselves if theorists, speaking to other theorists, still have some relation to your real world.

My field is literature – in other words, words. I want to start with a quibble about words.

I think we should be grateful to Edward Said et al. for introducing into English-language critical discourse such terms as orientalism, The Other, and minority discourse. We should not, however, let gratitude blind us to the blindness even of well-meaning American and British theorists.

I want to talk particularly about three terms as used in literary critical discourse: West, Third World, and The Other.

We know that many residents of the United States of America, particularly those in New York City, like to think of themselves as being at the center of the world. Let us indulge them and draw a map of the earth with the Americas in the middle, Asia on the left, and Europe on the right. On such a map, we can easily see that the Philippines is west of America and Europe. We are The West. Our literature, in other words, is Western literature. The literature of America and Europe, then, is Eastern or “Oriental” literature.

The origins of the term “Third World” in literary discourse are lost in political and economic history. The adjective third implies a first and a second numerically, and it also implies a pecking order in terms of value. A first-rate piece of literature is clearly better than a third-rate piece of literature. As all card-carrying New Critics know, words carry with them all their previous meanings; we cannot dissociate the term “third world” from “third-rate.” I ask: why are we in the Third World? Who gave anybody the right to call us the Third World? If I start counting from where I am – which is the accepted way since Descartes – I am the first person, therefore the First World, and all others have to content themselves with being the Second, Third, or nth Worlds. Philippine literature, in other words, from my point of view (using Henry James’s definition of that technical term), is First World literature, and American literature is Third World literature.

Now, The Other. You or even Thou are Other than me, but I don’t see why I should not enumerate pronouns starting from myself. In terms of gender, feminists are now beginning to see that calling the Woman the Other naively accepts the patriarchal Weltanschauung; Woman is Other only to Man. Gayatri Spivak has had a lot of fun deconstructing the term Wo-man. Similarly, in terms of race and geography, we are Other only to Said and company who live in the United States. I prefer to see America and Europe as The Other.

Why, then, do we not call Philippine literature Western, First World, and The One – or whatever is the binary opposite of The Other? I’ll tell you why. Because the English language prevents us from doing so.

Here is where race theorists can learn from gender theorists. Feminists know that the English language has a built-in bias for patriarchy, starting with the generic term for mankind. Feminists have succeeded, in some way, in eroding that bias. If we too, English-speaking non-Americans and non-Europeans work at it, we may yet, one day, put our mouths where our politics is.

Just as feminists have identified language as a key battleground in the war against patriarchy, we must also see the English language as a crucial space in our fight to tilt the balance of power in literary theory. Just as feminists are seeking to demasculinize language, we must seek to deethnicize English.

There is no use denying it, but the ruling paradigm in Philippine literary circles today is still New Criticism, or at least that non-ontological part of it not debunked by the neo-Aristotelian Chicago alumni among the English professors at the University of the Philippines. Teachers and critics still routinely talk about imagery, tone, point of view, metaphor, symbol, irony, theme, organic unity, and the other things made fashionable before the Pacific War by the American Southern Agrarian critics. Structuralist, even post-structuralist, concepts are seen in the Philippines as mere footnotes – albeit jargonized, frenchified, trendy – of formalist close reading. Even Marxists or Maoist-Marxists who explicitly disavow New Criticism invariably read literary texts in the expressive realist, pre-Saussurean, text-centered fashion so ably caricatured by Catherine Belsey. Mao’s aesthetic yardstick, for example, is widely (mis)interpreted to refer to form or craft.

Some critics, of course, while using New Criticism as their everyday method in classroom teaching, in judging literary contests, and in reviewing books and other texts, give the appearance of living in the heady world of foreign trendsetters, but there is little appreciation of the mutual incompatibility of many contemporary critical theories. The word eclectic is used to mask massive ignorance or, at least, muddled theoretical thinking. Nothing electic, strictly speaking, can be called a theory, but that philosophical quibble does not bother even our leading literary critics.

My own theoretical position is blatantly anti-Theoretical. I mean by Theory with the capital T the growing institution – should I say the gradual movement from emergent to dominant ideology? – of theory in British and American universities. Theory has become almost entirely divorced from reading practice.

I believe that the way we theorize should derive from the way we read texts, not the other way around. This has important implications for the linguistic quibble I have with the English language. We tend to read Philippine texts the way we read European or American texts. We call Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere a novel, for instance, thereby immediately implying that we have to apply to it theories of the novel derived entirely from European novels. I know that Rizal thought he was writing a European novel, but that has no bearing on the problem, particularly in these death-of-the-author days. Edgar Allan Poe thought that he was writing British magazine stories, but that has not changed the way American critics read “The Cask of Amontillado.” Soledad Reyes has already pointed the way to more sympathetic readings of so-called sentimental – or worse, “romantic” – Philippine novels, and Emmanuel Reyes has done a similar thing for Philippine films, but we still denounce Philippine serialized novels and films as melodramatic.

That’s about as much as I can get into this column. If you want more of the same, do write me, and I’ll gladly send you a complete copy of my comments. (By the way, I delivered the paper in Filipino, with the English translation given out to the foreign participants.)

(First published in Starweek, August, 1989.)
 

The People Must Remind the President (Gloria Macapagal Arroyo) of Her Obligation to Public Trust

We are former senior government officials who from experience know that strong democratic institutions are crucial to our progress as a whole nation. The most important institution our people depend on is the Office of the President. The responsible exercise of Presidential power is an important instrument for serving our nation's interests. A President that leads with righteousness and wisdom is a great blessing. A President that serves evil is a terrible curse. To secure a blessing and avoid a curse in the Presidency, the founding leaders of our democracy established a system of checks and balances.

The failure of checks and balances on the Presidency has allowed many past scandals to descend to a limbo of unresolved crimes against the public trust. Fertilizer scam. Election cheating. Shopping bags of cash in Malacanang. The NBN-ZTE scandal is just the latest monster in a larger pile of garbage from previous scandals. Our people are not going to let this one slip into the limbo again. Our search for truth, accountability and reforms must advance by getting our institutions to confront and resolve the corruption and cover up of this deal.

Our people have asked: Is President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo part of the NBN-ZTE corruption and cover up? She must act to help bring out the full truth about this deal if her hands are truly clean. The Arroyo Presidency must shelter the truth or it will be judged as a fortress for lies.

Our previous statement asked the President to take actions that were intended to demonstrate that indeed, like the people, she is against corruption and is angry at those engaged in it. Ordinary citizens can recognize the actions we asked of the President as reasonable under the present conditions: let the primary witness, Secretary Neri, testify without limitation; surrender all pertinent public documents on the deal to the Senate; follow usual administrative procedures by placing under preventive suspension those people under a cloud of doubt while an investigation is proceeding.

Since the President had already cancelled a deal that she judged tainted by corruption, these actions are logical and prudent. We demanded these actions not as an interest group but as a straightforward way for Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to demonstrate that she is a blessing not a curse in the Office of the President. We got involved because we saw it as our civic duty to help start the repair and rehabilitation of our institutions already severely damaged from past scandals. By doing the actions we called for, the President would have shown her respect of the system of checks and balance of our democracy by cooperating fully with the Senate to give our people the full picture of the corruption and cover up of the NBN-ZTE deal.

Even as we issued our statement, however, the President's spokepersons were summarily dismissing these demands. Later her advisers even criticized and threatened us for making these demands. The President is very poorly served by these spokespersons and advisers.

Revoking EO 464 does not serve the truth if Neri still invokes executive privilege and does not testify and, if, despite previous statements to the contrary, all records of the NBN-ZTE project have still not been submitted to the Senate. We believe the Supreme Court or the Senate must do their respective duties to serve the truth, but the President has a greater obligation. She has the greatest stake in the Senate investigation coming out with the truth or the people will conclude she hides behind lies and uses the power of her office to smother the truth.

We conclude that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo refuses to serve the people's demand for truth about a matter of great public interest. We see in this refusal, despite ample chances and many sound reasons, a clear basis for our people to find her complicit with and, in fact, at the center of, the corruption and cover up of the NBN-ZTE deal.

We express our loss of confidence in her. As a consequence we question not only her moral authority to govern, but also her ability to govern given the mounting garbage of lies and obfuscation that she is constrained to build to cover up the increasing stench of corruption in her administration.

We ask those directly appointed by the President if they believe, in their heart of hearts, that they are keeping faith with their signed oath to defend and protect the nation’s Constitution and its laws in the face of blatant, shameless corruption and violation of individual rights.

We ask those in the civil service and foreign service to examine their conscience to
discern if their continued service in this Administration is not in fact helping prop up a regime that, at best abets large-scale corruption, lies and cover up, and at worst is a party to them.

We call on our fellow citizens to press their demand for a just resolution of governance issues and violation of the public trust raised against the President.

For our part, we pledge to use our combined knowledge, capabilities and influence to help as many of our people understand the issues and explain the known facts surrounding the many instances of corruption and encourage them to act in accordance with the dictates of their conscience.

We shall work with other sectors to put forward and apply other measures to make our other democratic institutions work better in preventing, exposing and punishing corruption at any level of our government starting at the very top.

Signed by:

Florencio Abad, former Secretary, Department of Education
Tomas Africa, former Administrator, National Statistics Office
Rafael Alunan III, former Secretary, Department of the Interior and Local Government
Roberto Ansaldo, former Undersecretary, Department of Agriculture
Senen Bacani, former Secretary, Department of Agriculture
Angelito Banayo, former Presidential Adviser on Political Affairs
Emilia Boncodin, former Secretary, Department of Budget and Management
Leonor Briones, former National Treasurer
Gerardo Bulatao, former Undersecretary, Department of Agrarian Reform
Clifford Burkley, former Undersecretary, Department of Social Welfare and Development
Sostenes Campillo, Jr., former Undersecretary, Department of Tourism
Isagani Cruz, former Undersecretary, Department of Education
Jose Cuisia, Jr., former Governor, Central Bank of the Philippines
Guillermo Cunanan, former General Manager, Manila International Airport Authority
Karina Constantino-David, former Chair, Civil Service Commission
Edgardo Del Fonso, former Undersecretary, Department of Finance
Teresita Quintos Deles, former Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process
Benjamin Diokno, former Secretary, Department of Budget and Management
Quintin Doromal, former Commissioner, Presidential Commission on Good Government
Narcisa Escaler, former Ambassador to the United Nations
Evangeline Escobillo, former Commissioner, Insurance Commission
Jesus Estanislao, former Secretary, Department of Finance
Fulgencio Factoran, Jr., former Secretary, Department of Environment and Natural Resources
Victoria Garchitorena, former Head, Presidential Management Staff
Ernesto Garilao, former Secretary, Department of Agrarian Reform
Jose Luis Gascon, former Undersecretary, Department of Education
Marietta Goco, former Chair, Presidential Commission to Fight Poverty
Cielito Habito, former Director-General, NEDA
Edilberto de Jesus, Jr., former Secretary, Department of Education
Philip Ella Juico, former Secretary, Department of Agrarian Reform
Lina Laigo, former Secretary, Department of Social Welfare and Development
Ernest Leung, former Secretary, Department of Finance
Josefina Lichauco, former Secretary, Department of Transportation and Communications
Narzalina Lim, former Secretary, Department of Tourism
Juan Miguel Luz, former Undersecretary, Department of Education
Felipe Medalla, former Director-General, NEDA
Jose Molano, Jr., former Executive Director, Commission on Filipinos Overseas
Vitaliano Nañagas, former Chair, Development Bank of the Philippines
Conrado Navarro, former Undersecretary, Department of Agrarian Reform
Norberto Nazareno, former President, Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation
Imelda Nicolas, former Lead Convenor, National Anti-Poverty Commission
Victor Ordonez, former Undersecretary, Department of Education
Cayetano Paderanga, Jr., former Director-General, NEDA
Vicente Paterno, former Minister, Ministry of Trade
Felicito Payumo, former Chairman, Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority
Cesar Purisima, former Secretary, Department of Finance
Rolando Querubin, former Undersecretary, Department of Agrarian Reform
Albert del Rosario, former Ambassador to the United States
Francisco del Rosario, former Chair, Development Bank of the Philippines
Ramon del Rosario, Jr., former Secretary, Department of Finance
Victor Ramos, former Secretary, Department of Environment and Natural Resources
Amina Rasul, former Presidential Adviser and Concurrent Chair on Youth Affairs
Rodolfo Reyes, former Press Secretary
Walfrido Reyes, former Undersecretary, Department of Tourism
Juan Santos, former Secretary, Department of Trade and Industry
Cesar Sarino, former Secretary, Department of the Interior and Local Government
Corazon Juliano-Soliman, former Secretary, Department of Social Welfare and Development
Hector Soliman, former Undersecretary, Department of Agrarian Reform
Mario Taguiwalo, former Undersecretary, Department of Health
Jaime Galvez Tan, former Secretary, Department of Health
Ricardo Tan, former President, Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation
Wigberto Tañada, former Commissioner, Bureau of Customs
V. Bruce Tolentino, former Undersecretary, Department of Agriculture
Rene Villa, former Secretary, Department of Agrarian Reform
Veronica Villavicencio, former Lead Convenor, National Anti-Poverty Commission