Why Are Filipinos So Poor?

By F. Sionil José

What did South Korea look like after the Korean War in 1953? Battered, poor – but look at
Korea now. In the Fifties, the traffic in Taipei was composed of bicycles and army trucks, the
streets flanked by tile-roofed low buildings. Jakarta was a giant village and Kuala Lumpur a
small village surrounded by jungle and rubber plantations. Bangkok was criss-crossed with
canals, the tallest structure was the Wat Arun, the Temple of the Sun, and it dominated the
city’s skyline. Rice fields all the way from Don Muang airport – then a huddle of galvanized iron-
roofed bodegas, to the Victory monument.

Visit these cities today and weep – for they are more beautiful, cleaner and prosperous than
Manila. In the Fifties and Sixties, we were the most envied country in Southeast Asia.
Remember further that when Indonesia got its independence in 1949, it had only 114 university
graduates compared with the hundreds of Ph.D.’s that were already in our universities. Why
then were we left behind? The economic explanation is simple. We did not produce cheaper
and better products.

The basic question really is why we did not modernize fast enough and thereby doomed our
people to poverty. This is the harsh truth about us today. Just consider these: some 15 years
ago a survey showed that half of all grade school pupils dropped out after grade 5 because they
had no money to continue schooling. Thousands of young adults today are therefore unable to
find jobs. Our natural resources have been ravaged and they are not renewable. Our
tremendous population increase eats up all of our economic gains. There is hunger in this
country now; our poorest eat only once a day. But this physical poverty is really not as serious
as the greater poverty that afflicts us and this is the poverty of the spirit.

Why then are we poor? More than ten years ago, James Fallows, editor of the Atlantic Monthly,
came to the Philippines and wrote about our damaged culture which, he asserted, impeded our
development. Many disagreed with him but I do find a great deal of truth in his analysis.

This is not to say that I blame our social and moral malaise on colonialism alone. But we did
inherit from Spain a social system and an elite that, on purpose, exploited the masses. Then,
too, in the Iberian peninsula, to work with one’s hands is frowned upon and we inherited that
vice as well. Colonialism by foreigners may no longer be what it was, but we are now a colony
of our own elite.

We are poor because we are poor – this is not a tautology. The culture of poverty is self-
perpetuating. We are poor because our people are lazy. I pass by a slum area every morning –
dozens of adults do nothing but idle, gossip and drink. We do not save. Look at the Japanese
and how they save in spite of the fact that the interest given them by their banks is so little. They
work very hard too.

We are great show-offs. Look at our women, how overdressed, over-coiffed they are, and
Imelda epitomizes that extravagance. Look at our men, their manicured nails, their personal
jewelry, their diamond rings. Yabang – that is what we are, and all that money expended on
status symbols, on yabang. How much better if it were channeled into production.
We are poor because our nationalism is inward looking. Under its guise we protect inefficient
industries and monopolies. We did not pursue agrarian reform like Japan and Taiwan. It is not
so much the development of the rural sector, making it productive and a good market as well.
Agrarian reform releases the energies of the landlords who, before the reform, merely waited for
the harvest. They become entrepreneurs, the harbingers of change.

Our nationalist icons like Claro M. Recto and Lorenzo Tanada opposed agrarian reform, the
single most important factor that would have altered the rural areas and lifted the peasant from
poverty. Both of them were merely anti-American.

And finally, we are poor because we have lost our ethical moorings. We condone cronyism
and corruption and we don’t ostracize or punish the crooks in our midst. Both cronyism and
corruption are wasteful but we allow their practice because our loyalty is to family or friend, not
to the larger good.

We can tackle our poverty in two very distinct ways. The first choice: a nationalist revolution, a
continuation of the revolution in 1896. But even before we can use violence to change inequities
in our society, we must first have a profound change in our way of thinking, in our culture.

My regret about EDSA is that change would have been possible then with a minimum of
bloodshed. In fact, a revolution may not be bloody at all if something like EDSA would present
itself again. Or a dictator unlike Marcos.

The second is through education, perhaps a longer and more complex process. The only
problem is that it may take so long and by the time conditions have changed, we may be back
where we were, caught up with this tremendous population explosion which the Catholic Church
exacerbates in its conformity with doctrinal purity.

We are faced with a growing compulsion to violence, but even if the communists won, they will
rule as badly because they will be hostage to the same obstructions in our culture, the barkada,
the vaulting egos that sundered the revolution in 1896, the Huk revolt in 1949-53.

To repeat, neither education nor revolution can succeed if we do not internalize new

attitudes, new ways of thinking. Let us go back to basics and remember those American
slogans: A Ford in every garage. A chicken in every pot. Money is like fertilizer: to do any good
it must be spread around. Some Filipinos, taunted wherever they are, are shamed to admit they
are Filipinos.

I have, myself, been embarrassed to explain, for instance, why Imelda, her children and the
Marcos cronies are back, and in positions of power. Are there redeeming features in our country
that we can be proud of? Of course, lots of them. When people say, for instance, that our
corruption will never be banished, just remember that Arsenio Lacson as mayor of Manila and
Ramon Magsaysay as president brought a clean government.

We do not have the classical arts that brought Hinduism and Buddhism to continental and
archipelagic Southeast Asia, but our artists have now ranged the world, showing what we have
done with Western art forms, enriched with our own ethnic traditions. Our professionals, not just
our domestics, are all over, showing how accomplished a people we are!
Look at our history. We are the first in Asia to rise against Western colonialism, the first to
establish a republic. Recall the Battle of Tirad Pass and glory in the heroism of Gregorio del
Pilar and the 48 Filipinos who died but stopped the Texas Rangers from capturing the president
of that First Republic. Its equivalent in ancient history is the Battle of Thermopylae where the
Spartans and their king Leonidas, died to a man, defending the pass against the invading
Persians.

Rizal – what nation on earth has produced a man like him? At 35, he was a novelist, a poet, an
anthropologist, a sculptor, a medical doctor, a teacher and martyr. We are now 80 million and in
another two decades we will pass the 100 million mark.

Eighty million – that is a mass market in any language, a mass market that should absorb our
increased production in goods and services – a mass market which any entrepreneur can hope
to exploit, like the proverbial oil for the lamps of China.

Japan was only 70 million when it had confidence enough and the wherewithal to challenge the
United States and almost won. It is the same confidence that enabled Japan to flourish from the
rubble of defeat in World War II.

I am not looking for a foreign power for us to challenge. But we have a real and insidious enemy
that we must vanquish, and this enemy is worse than the intransigence of any foreign
power. We are our own enemy. And we must have the courage, the will, to change
ourselves.