A Private Corporation Called Government

21 Oct. 09

Should the government have its way, some 80,000 families (400 thousand individuals, mostly children) who took refuge in evacuation centers in Metro Manila will not be allowed to return to their homes or what’s left of them. It’s one of the measures being considered by government to prevent another flooding of the metro cities. The rationale is that these families inhabit the esteros and rivers banks, blocking the free flow of waters out to the sea. They are also said to be responsible for the huge amount of garbage thrown into the rivers. Therefore, they must go – “Balik Provincia” or by whatever name – or to some other places in the peripheries of the metropolis.

Government and private urban planners have this mindset that informal dwellers inhabiting city sectors labeled “squatter areas” are urban blights that make the city ugly and dirty, breed criminals and insurgents and impede progress. And so, while city development plans designate sectors for industrial, commercial, government, residential and recreation purposes – there is none for social housing. People from the provinces troop to the city centers mainly due to rural poverty and lack of opportunities for gainful employment and upward social movement in rural Philippines. These provincianos actually form the bulk of the city’s working force. They are the bakers’ helpers, construction workers, stevedores and porters, vegetable and fish vendors, bodega hands, waitresses and sales girls, drivers, janitors, yayas, lavanderas and maids. Some of them manage to get regular employment in factories and offices. They survive with very low wages and because of that the middle class people are able to enjoy a little comfort in life and the owners and managers of capital, rich. What would life of the middle class and the rich be without them?

And yet, they are treated like the garbage of Pasig River to be extracted from the clogged waterways and thrown out because they are standing in the way of the city’s development. Actually, there’s a law, the Urban Development and Housing Act (UDHA) of 1992 that mandates each city to set aside land for social housing. But aside from giving the authors some “pogi” points for election purposes, nothing much has come out of it. Compare that with the Mining Act of 1995 that covers nearly all of the country’s mountain and hills for exploitation by foreign mining companies, and implemented before the legal processes are sufficiently complied with and under dubious circumstances. Or the various agreements with the Chinese government to devote a million hectares of the valleys and plains for crops that are bound for export to China. Why doesn’t the Philippine government give decent housing to its own citizens who truly carry the brunt of the Philippine economy?

It’s all a matter of perspective. And perspective is basically determined by the standpoint that one takes. Where we are looking to and what we see depend on where we stand. Those who are appointed by government to do urban planning and development are likely to have come from private planning and development companies. With this background, they don’t see government building houses for people. Their job as they see it is that of providing opportunities and incentives to private developers to invest in housing projects. Naturally for private developers low-cost housing for the poor does not appear in their investment scans. Not only that: these officials are likely to have established personal and business relationships with developers some of whom may be unscrupulous. And that’s what is happening – housing projects built on low-lying places and, in fact, catch basins for water overflowing from rivers and lakes.

The truth of the matter is that private developers don’t build houses for the poor, and in collusion with housing authorities construct houses on the most unnatural places, wrecking havoc on nature’s ways. And government does urban housing planning this way because of the principle that government is there not to compete with private business but to pave the way for it to flourish – without the highest good of the nation in mind.

To a certain extent, the Philippine government is a private corporation or at least run by officials who represent the interest of private companies. In that scheme of things, only a few are winners; the rest of the people are always on the losing end. Government position is a public trust. But this is fiction. Even elections are a private transaction between candidates and voters with the bigger spender winning most of time.

When are we going to wake up to this illusion?