Uncertainty Hounds As Eastern Visayas Breaks Away From The Past

 

BIMBO CABIDOG

The people of Eastern Visayas inhabit a land rich in natural resources. The region has a vast land area. Samar alone is the third largest island of the Philippine archipelago. All three major land masses have sizeable portions of alluvial soil and vegetative covers replete with various forest products. The mantle beneath contains precious minerals from chrome to copper, nickel and gold.

It is apparently a great irony that despite the trove of natural wealth complemented by a highly literate and talented populace, Eastern Visayas would yet place third among the poorest regions in the country. Undeniably, EV’s per capita Gross Regional Domestic Product bears this official categorization out. The reality has always accompanied it even up to recent years.

The question now is: how long will the region languish in this state? What are its development prospects over the near or far future?

Lay observers as well as experts find much reason to be optimistic in what they see today. The Eastern Visayas projects a community about to break away from the past. The region is undoubtedly several degrees different now than two decades ago. Physical change shows them out. But economic figures also tell of a region that has improved a lot in productivity and performance.

Woes from burgeoning urban sprawls, newfound prosperity easily translating to acquisitions like the buying of cars, and rapid modernization are likewise catching up. Vehicular traffic in thoroughfares, for one, has become an emerging headache. For sure, the volume of private vehicles as well as PUVs on roads has dramatically increased from, say, ten years ago.

Region 8’s economy grew fastest in 2016, besting the other 17 regions, and exceeding even the growth rate posted by the National Capital Region and the national average. The Philippine Statistics Authority recorded the Gross Regional Domestic Product to have surged by 12.4 percent in the said year outpacing the NCR’s growth rate of 7.5 percent and the national average’s 6.9 percent.

A strong performance by the industry sector boosted the record growth of the GRDP. Production here went up by 20.2 percent accounting for 44.3 percent of the local economy. Construction, one of the industry’s vital subsectors, grew by a most impressive 44.5 percent. Manufacturing grew by 19.6 percent. Construction and manufacturing carried the region’s upsurge.

A bank analyst attributed the performance to the rehabilitation efforts that have been going on since the destruction wrought by Supertyphoon Yolanda. They had just about picked up around this time. But being the case, there was also fear that the record growth may not be sustained. Once the post-Yolanda rebuilding tapers, the Eastern Visayas may just have nothing anymore to fuel further progress. Declining growth can supersede the productivity boom and dampen its psychological boost.

The case at once became true with the dip in GRDP, which only grew by 1.8 percent, the following year. By 2018, this would only recover by 5.9 percent. What saved the disheartening fall was the services sector. While industrial performance slowed, services accelerated by 10.5 percent, accounting for 44.4 percent of the regional economy. They also employed about 53 percent of the labor force.

An ocular survey would show the figures in concrete. The rise of the services sector owed to the proliferation of retail outlets, hotels, restaurants and food store chains which are readily seen around the boom cities and towns. The GRDP growth would also stem from the increase in the volume of flights and airline passengers, the former by 28 percent and the latter by 25 percent.

In another breadth, the weight of annual domestic cargo and cargo throughput rose by almost 22 percent. This indicated the invigoration of trade. But agriculture was a let-down. While industrial firms absorbed only 15 percent of the labor force, their output would be eight times more than that of agriculture which accounted for 31.5 percent of the labor force. The sector declined to 0.5 percent in 2018, down from 1.0 growth in 2017.

The recorded ups and downs show yet an unstable status. Eastern Visayas had a long way to go, and there was much left to be desired. Its per capita RGDP of PhP37,121 in 2017 and PhP38,598 in 2018 still fell way below the national average of PhP86,270. These presented third lowest in the country.

Bright Scenarios

What scenarios offer optimistic prospects on the region’s socio-economic development?

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas in an economic assessment nationwide reported that Eastern Visayas, first and foremost looks into an influx of tourists, a host of them on high-end expeditions of cruise ships going to such exquisite destinations as Limasawa, Capul, Kalanggaman and Cuatro Islas. The region also expects thousands of guests to come and take part in the celebration of the Leyte Landing Anniversary every year.

The BSP further reports that the region sees new investments, for instance, in the construction of hotels, banks and fast food chains. These generate revenues and jobs. The posh Summit Hotel has been newly built in Tacloban City and begun operation. The franchise mall of SM Prime Holdings Inc. in Ormoc City also has finished construction and opened.

The 7-Eleven convenience store chain has come to Ormoc, Palo and Tacloban depicting a rosy picture of the regional market base for retail of its kind. The promising market sets the stage for the rise of more micro-, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs).  

The proposed establishment of the Leyte Ecological Industrial Zone (LEIZ) is at the pre-feasibility study stage. The impact project advances rural industrialization, adopts and intensifies industry clustering, and introduces competitive as well as resilient industries.

In IT, guest hosting services, fast food and retail, the region is creating business models unimagined twenty years ago. Though initially hesitating and sputtering, these new engines of growth have set Eastern Visayas on a dynamic and vibrant course of development.

The bright scenarios could however prove illusory under the current situation. All these have slammed into the COVID 19 pandemic and drift in turbulent straits after five months of economically strangulating lockdowns. Now, with an open-ended crisis in public health getting much worse than better, everything has become uncertain.

 

Why Hasn't People Power Greatly Benefited The People Themselves?

 

BIMBO CABIDOG

The world heaped praises on the Filipinos for a four-day revolt that overthrew Ferdinand Marcos on February 25, 1986. He ruled them for 14 years as a ruthless dictator. But in an uprising dubbed Edsa Revolution, millions of civilians took to the streets to defy and end his authoritarian regime.

The letters EDSA stand for the Epifanio Delos Santos Avenue, a 12-lane thoroughfare that girds Metro Manila and at a certain point wedges between the country’s central military and police headquarters, Camp Aguinaldo and Camp Crame.

On February 22, 1986 citizens started massing along the camps initially to shield from the wrath of Marcos a group of junior military officers who plotted a mutiny but were at once pre-emptively foiled by loyal security forces. They holed up at the National Defense offices to escape retaliation.

The few civilian numbers at the start swelled into millions, and the gathering rapidly evolved into full-blown urban insurrection. Then the tide suddenly turned. As the throng at Edsa obstinately held on, the Armed Forces disintegrated from massive defections to the rebel side. On the evening of February 25, Marcos fled Malacanang via an American rescue that flew the strongman all the way to Hawaii.

What gained the adulation of the international community for the four–day epic was not so much the drama and astonishing audacity displayed by millions of ordinary citizens who faced barehanded a formidable rule with awesome military firepower, but that it succeeded with no bloodshed.

The victory of the mass action came from its moral high ground. From this source of strength, leaders would coin the phrase People Power.  The vaunted miracle at Edsa, hailed by citizens of other countries around the world, was the dynamo that generated historical change. It was people power.

The “peaceful revolution” itself revolutionized democratic practice, not only in the country, but in many parts of the globe. Direct mass action overruled electoral exercise in changing a repressive political order. Following Edsa, people power would become very popular worldwide and actually be resorted to in struggles for social liberation among climes reeling under totalitarian regimes.

But aside from the ouster of discredited regimes, the powerful political dynamo has generated no other historical change for the greater benefit of the people. It has not gone into changing their lives for the better. It has repetitively failed to turn towards effecting real social transformation.

Decades after the Edsa Revolution, most Filipinos continue to be marginalized under the political order misconceived even by the educated as democracy, but actually the rule of a few. The dismantling of Marcos’s one-man rule did not change the dispensation wherein the elite lord over social wealth and wield economic power, which enable them to dominate elections and ultimately government.

The so-called “restoration of democracy” in 1986 would mean only the replacement of the Marcos dictatorship by the reign of political dynasties later that monopolized government authority and deny the people the power to collectively chart their future. These dynastic groups would busy themselves only with building and consolidating each family's fiefdom or sphere of political-economic domination instead of governing well.

People power may have won in driving Marcos out of office, but the people still lost genuine empowerment.  They had no meaningful role in governance, and their supposed democratic exercise boiled down to shading names of candidates on the ballot. And that singular act, they would yet sell to politicians. 

Under the setup, the masses continued to languish in acute poverty, lack access to social services, confront perennial unemployment, or work for dismally low wages. The dynamo of historical change must yet be harnessed to bail them from ills rooted in the main problem of socio-political injustice.

This was the one expectation that the Edsa Revolution could not meet. This is because they are realities that ultimately have to be dealt with locally and specifically and by the people’s genuine empowerment.

Profound change in the conditions and situations of existence of the vast majority can only happen if the people go further than the spontaneous mobilization and action that occurred at Edsa. They must be able to wage strategic, deep-going and long-term struggles collectively and in organized fashion.

People power can be truly for the people if it serves their interest of realizing structural change in society. It must therefore evolve into people’s empowerment. This means that they see their lot down to its roots, process information from higher awareness, organize, and take consciously directed action. 

To create the kind of history wherein society has truly been transformed and the lives of the masses have immensely improved the people must learn to wield people power, not just for the good anyone else, but for their greater benefit.

The Seed That Fell 37 Years Ago

 

BIMBO CABIDOG

As mentioned in John 12:24, the Christ speaking to two disciples said: “Unless a grain falls to the ground and dies, it remains by itself. But if it dies, it produces a large crop.”

Such was the seed that fell on the tarmac of the Manila International Airport when Ninoy Aquino was assassinated in the hands of state security forces, 37 years ago.

The seed was Ninoy’s fight to restore freedom and democracy in the country. A treacherous shot to the head would snuff it as he went down the stairs from his plane under military escorts.

By thus, a noble crusade ended. But shortly after Ninoy’s fight fell to the ground and died, it lived in millions of his fellow countrymen who rose up to end repression and injustice.

The murder of the former senator on August 21, 1983 shook and awakened the nation. Still doubting him until that sacrifice, I myself who was already a hard-core element of the unyielding anti-dictatorship struggle could feel the power of its message.

Many people awoke to the sense that this was not the time to hesitate anymore. Whether or not we believe in each other, this was the moment to collectively confront the evil that seemed so formidable.

The martyrdom at the tarmac would be the single moment that began the end of Ferdinand Marcos who ravaged the country for two decades. In 1986, following three years of relentless political tumult, the strongman fled amidst a citizens’ uprising accompanied by massive defections in the Armed Forces.

Ninoy Aquino was no radical or firebrand. The nearest to his persona may be political maverick. But he was a voluble and mesmerizing speaker whose expositions on the situation of the country as well as imprudent asides against the powers-that-be captivated audiences.

The opposition senator exposed shenanigans in the highest office, above all bringing to public attention the infamous Jabidah Massacre that occurred in the island of Corregidor under a classified operation ordered by Marcos, to secretly train dogs of war and later grab in a commando strike the Malaysian state of Sabah.

Marcos was on his second term as elected president of the republic. Already on course to be the country’s next Chief Executive, then Senator Benigno S. Aquino Jr. (or Ninoy as he was fondly called) never let the most powerful man in the land off the hot seat.

A charismatic political figure, Ninoy was the hands-down choice to invite to our oath-taking as newly elected officials of the university’s supreme student council. In an evening dinner conference after the induction ceremony, pausing from a sumptuous meal, I asked him about Oplan Sagittarius or Marcos’s dark plot to impose martial law, which he bared in the senate. I followed up with the question: what are you going to do if that happens?

After explaining the reliability of the information and the certainty of the plot materializing anytime soon, the youthful solon’s unblinking answer to my second query was, “I’ll run to the hills.” Was he really going to do that? I just took the answer with a grain of salt.

It was mid-year of 1972, already an apt season for barnstorming by presidential wannabes en route to the elections. Ninoy had a snowballing popular support. His political fortunes were piling up. He was shoo-in for the next occupant of Malacanang.

But the presidency never came. Ninoy would have a different date with history as one of the very first victims of pre-preemptive warrantless arrests by Marcos’s armed minions. He was with other opposition leaders who were nabbed and detained in military camps even before the announcement of Proclamation 1081 that placed the entire country under Martial Law.

Cruel fate would have the promising political figure spend the next seven years in incarceration, at times in long solitary confinement under harsh conditions that made him wish death more than life. A military tribunal would cap those years with a rigged trial that convicted Ninoy for trumped-up charges and sentenced him to death by firing squad.

In a surprise trade-off though, the Marcos regime let him have a heart bypass operation and take self-exile in the United States. He breathed free air in a foreign land. Nonetheless, he would choke at the continuing climate of fear and suppression that gripped his country. For three years, he endured it, then finally boarded a flight back home and met his death.

Run to the hills! Ninoy was no longer able to do that. But I was and that I did, a few years after the declaration of martial law. Fascism drove us to where angels fear to tread. I joined the ones who resisted up to the point of putting our lives in line, up to the offering of the ultimate sacrifice, that is: to die if needed for the rest of fellow countrymen to live free.

I was in my earliest twenties, out of school, impetuous and driven by a sense of patriotism believing, as many contemporaries who joined the struggle did, that taking up arms was the only recourse. I survived the perils and near-death living of those dangerous years to still fight when Ninoy could not anymore, beyond August 1983.  

The lesson in his heroic sacrifice is this: if one has to die, it must make others live. There is no denying that what Ninoy lost in a lifelong struggle, on that momentous day 37 years ago he won in death. And that was because his lot of losing made many others gain. The one thing that was lost radicalized everything.

Know Eastern Visayas, An Unchanged Past In The Changing Times (R8 SERIES)

BIMBO CABIDOG

In photo right is the regional government center located at Candahug, Palo, Leyte

Arrivals from the west would change Philippine history twice in a span of 400 years. These happened on the island-chain astride the Philippine Sea, now known as the Eastern Visayas.

In September, 1519 the Spanish fleet Armada de Molucca, under the command of the Portuguese man-of-war Ferdinand Magellan, set sail on a westerly direction across the Atlantic Ocean and around the American landmass to the south. Magellan planned to blaze an alternative route to the East by navigating the forbidding Pacific Ocean.

What remained of the five ships that embarked on the storm-tossed voyage anchored off the island of Homonhon one and a half years later on March 16, 1521. Probably the first contact between the west and east on the Pacific side of Asia, the discovery by western travelers of the islands of Samar and Leyte ushered 350 years of Spanish rule in the archipelago.

An artist's rendition of the Spanish fleet commanded by Portuquese man-of-war    Ferdinand Magellan sailing westward across the Pacific Ocean to the east.

The other heralded arrival was on October 20, 1944 when divisions of the United States Armed Forces under General Douglas MacArthur hit Red Beach at Palo, Leyte to get back the Philippines from the Japanese. The event paved the way to the return of the Americans to their old colony.

The US comeback tied the country’s fate over the second half of the 20^th century to the overarching influence and, many a times, dictates of Washington.

Both first and second coming by western expeditions across the Pacific Ocean established the role of the Samar-Leyte island chain as gateway to the whole of the Philippine Archipelago.

This was the reality for four centuries until air travel shifted the point of international entry to Manila and Cebu. The shift removed Eastern Visayas from global trade and left it for years in the doldrums of underdevelopment.

Local folks who are currently in their sixties would reminisce the time when they occasionally hear of a “estranghero” (foreign ship) weighing anchor along the Leyte Gulf or docking at the port of Tacloban. But now, instead of the old maritime visitors, the region would be in the path of an average of 20 tropical cyclones visiting the Philippine Archipelago every year.

The state of affairs for decades relegated Eastern Visayas to the status of one of three poorest regions in the country. And for decades, it would be treated more as a patient in the ICU than a player in the country’s bat for sustained economic growth.

Development Potentials

Current observations however note that the region’s misfortunes are past. They view Eastern Visayas as a region in the cusp of change, rising like a phoenix above the Pacific Ocean’s rim. With a population growing by an average annual rate of 1.52 percent, quickened built-up development matched by inroads into modernization is surely taking over its hubs and urban centers.

The observation of progress jibes with the sprouting of information-technology-driven outfits. Regular access to the worldwide web through an upgraded telecommunications infrastructure, along with the proliferation of third-fourth generation smart phones, would enable pioneering in hitherto uncharted waters of business, besides much more effective and quicker ways at doing things, like marketing.

In photo is the Leyte Academic Center, an IT hub pioneered by the provincial government to create job opportunities in the region through the lucrative business process outsourcing. 

Advanced technologies in communication would close the yawning gap between city and countryside, the busy concentrations of commerce and the idling rural areas.

The Spanish arrival in the 16^th century and the comeback of the American colonial forces 400 years later highlighted the strategic geographical importance of Eastern Visayas to trade and military missions in the orient by western expeditions plying the Pacific Ocean.

Located along the mid portion of the Philippine archipelago, the region harbors direct access to the great body of water that hugs the eastern continental stretch of Asia and hems the North American West Coast, Mexico and Africa.

The close adjacent islands of Leyte and Samar offer the advantage of a gulf girding the north-eastern promontory of the former and the south-eastern peninsula of the latter. This marine haven contains coves for vessels to shelter from the gales of the open sea.

The Eastern Visayas is approximately 700 kilometers southeast of the national capital. It covers an area of 2,156,285 hectares that is administratively subdivided into six provinces and 12 districts. These are in turn broken down into seven cities, 136 municipalities and 4,390 barangays. The provinces are Southern Leyte, Leyte, Biliran, Western Samar, Northern Samar and Eastern Samar.

According to the 2015 actual census, the Eastern Visayas had a total population of 4,440,150. This has steadily grown over the years, despite continuing out-migration to Metro Manila and overseas. (Below is a data graphic detailing significant information about the region.)

Natives of the region speak the main tongues of Waray, Cebuano, Boholano and Abaknon. They are not culturally diverse, but observe predominantly Catholic religious practices and traditions. They make up though an auspicious human resource to power accelerated socio-economic development.

A peculiar ethno-linguistic distinction may be held in common by them. What that is has been a question scholars have pondered but got no definite answers. One thing stands out though: the people of Eastern Visayas are God-fearing yet fierce warriors in battles. They have fought wars for land and fellow countrymen with exemplary valour and heroism. 

Eastern Visayas's urban folks of noticeable rural origins have adapted to the modern past time called malling which offers the enjoyment of leisure in air conditioned surroundings and the posh amenities of giant retail outlets.

Two revolutionary struggles against Spanish colonial rule and American imperialist annexation when Filipinos greeted the dawn of their nation’s birth, and an obstinate guerrilla warfare halfway through the past century when Asia fell into the grip of Japanese imperial conquest, have molded in the people of Region VIII a character up to the daunting challenges of development in the new millennium.

The Severest Disaster To Hit In Years

BIMBO CABIDOG

Last March 16, 2020 the government placed the country under various types of lockdown in response to COVID 19. Five months later, the nation is churning in the severest disaster to hit in years, its leaders’ own making. 

As a result of the measure to arrest the pandemic, “martial-law style” (according to some excited police generals), businesses closed sending millions of folks out of job. Markets stumbled due to curtailed consumption with people either stripped of purchasing power or confined to their homes. Livelihoods slid into bankruptcy. The economy nose-dived.

But by August, in the biggest spike of COVID infections over a single day, the country registered 6,352 new positive cases easily upping those infected by the virus to 112,593. This would spiral in a couple of days when the Philippines chalked the highest in the pandemic tally throughout Southeast Asia or the West Pacific, dislodging Indonesia with a population of more than 200 million at the top spot. The numbers now near the 200,000 mark.

Confronted by the outcome, the national government is singing a different tune: it has to lift the community quarantines. Ironically this, after the infected have risen exponentially from a few hundreds at the start of the CQs in March to more than a hundred and fifty thousand after four months of the longest and strictest lockdown in the world.

It seems that the virus already comes second of the people’s worries. The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) reported that the economy fell by 16.5 percent over the second quarter, the steepest since 1983 during the Marcos dictatorship when it fell by 10.7 percent. The contraction meant the country has hit the grave condition called recession, a general decline in trade and industry marked by negative growths of the gross domestic product over two consecutive quarters.

According to acting Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Kendrick Chua, the lockdown grounded three fourths of the nation’s economic activities. The very first to be hit were the airlines, which cancelled flights right at the start of the quarantines and went on indefinite holiday for the next three months. The ensuing land, sea and air transport stoppages paralyzed social and economic mobility.

With commerce and industry virtually at a standstill, unemployment rate rose to 17.4 percent, the highest in 15 years. By April, according to the PSA, 7.3 million Filipinos were jobless. The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) noted that since January, already 1.9 million workers went out of job due to closures, while “flexible work arrangements,” like forced leave and reduced workdays, displaced 1.1 million. As the pandemic lashed and quarantines enveloped the country in gloom, millions more of workers including returning OFWs ejected from work abroad would park without means of earning.

Towards August, nearly 7,000 business establishments across the country told DOLE they were either laying-off workers or shutting down for good. The closures would further displace 141,958 workers. The mindless denial by the government of the ABS-CBN franchise renewal in July, which poised to axe 11,000 workers at the end of August, exacerbated the dire situation. Unemployment at present has risen to a record high of 45.5 percent or 27.7 million jobless.

The grounding of economic activity by the ill-conceived lockdowns cost the country around PhP1.5 trillion a month. The Gross Domestic Product shrank to PhP8.6 trillion during the April-June period this year from PhP9.3 trillion of the same quarter last year, National Statistician Claire Dennis Mapa said.

The steep decline in the second quarter GDP would be the biggest since 1981, and the fastest drop year-on-year since World War II. Overall, the current team of the government’s economic managers anticipates a contraction of the economy at 5.5 percent for the whole of 2020. Unavoidable at this point, the downturn is unprecedented. 

It was not as if his administration evaded being one major casualty itself. President Duterte, in his nocturnal addresses to the nation, would complain that the public coffers are almost dried up. Market downtrends cut down tax collection over the period of the community quarantines, making the government dependent on trillions of loans for continued operation. An unequivocal admission that it is already in the red is Duterte’s constant harping of the line, “I have no more money.”

Despite the imposition of virtual police-military rule with its punishing restrictions or protocols on the populace, COVID 19 merely intensified and there’s hardly any sign now of it abating. But the accompanying reality to this would prove even worse: a more deadly toll of great masses of the people with no means of living, staring into an abyss of social and economic uncertainty, and on the threshold of hunger if not yet there. It is not likely that all these are just going to vanish in the months or even years ahead.

The government’s handling or fumbling of the health challenge certainly generated a highly disastrous backlash. But the most catastrophic outcome on the lives of Filipinos may yet be to come, even as the pandemic continues to devastate their country. Do they at the helm who have been directing all the responses to it comprehend the magnitude of those responses’ cataclysmic consequences?  Or are they even ready to comprehend such?

The heads of the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF-MEID) who call the shots on the crisis definitely bungled. Now, what? Instead of buckling down to correct mistakes, restrategize and yet save the nation, they bend towards gas lighting to save face. They either heap the blame on the citizenry for being allegedly undisciplined and "pasaway," or peddle falsities to deflect attention from the main concern: that the country has risen to become No. 1 in COVID cases in the region, despite the militarist controls on the populace to curb it leading to the worst economic debacle on record.

What the country’s present ordeal will turn out is hard to see. No matter how the authorities drum up optimism on getting over it in the immediate future, any clear end to the raging COVID 19 pandemic is nowhere in sight. Only one thing is certain, that whatever is up ahead remains bleak and unpredictable. If results until now are the gauge, the country yet stands to lose the fight against the disease.

Unseen and by and large just imagined, the dreaded virus has presented something of an enigma, easy to cite but hard to fathom. It has struck in the fashion of what prayerful Catholics oft mention as the sorrowful mystery. The plague would not only inflect sickness and death by the thousands, but foist unprecedented suffering to millions of people who have lost their wherewithal to live.

For an organism, invisible to the naked eye, to imperil man purportedly with the highest intelligence of all life forms, overpower him whose might has remade the world after his image and likeness, wreak havoc on society, and humble the proudest knowledge in the wake of its fury, is beyond thought. In the final analysis, no science may really know this COVID 19.