INTRODUCTION
It is a high honor to be asked to serve as guest speaker of your association, so i deeply regret my inability to come to personally honor your invitation. Previous commitments and a very tight schedule prevented me from meeting with you today.

This notwithstanding, I asked your president, Mr. Vince Vargas, upon receipt of your invitation, if i could send a representative to your affair tonight, and he agreed. I have therefore asked my spokesman, former tourism secretary Rafael Alunan, to meet with you tonight and read this message on my behalf.

In addressing these words to your association, I know that I speak to a community of professionals, managers and executives whose work is vital to the health and vigor of the companies and agencies you serve and represent. Further, I’m aware that you represent an innovative area in modern-day business and administration — the use of computer technology.

This might seem a premature point to raise now, considering that i still have to be formally proclaimed and inaugurated as president of our republic. But I want to emphasize this early, that my administration intends to focus on concrete issues and concerns. And when I therefore reach out to organizations such as yours, i want to cut through the generalities of politics and focus at once on the areas where we can help each other.

Science and technology will be a major concern of my administration. And this is the specific sphere where our needs intersect — as leaders, professionals and managers.

We are often told that science and technology are what the future is all about — and never more so than for developing countries like the Philippines which are trying to catch up with the modern world.

These two subjects make up the new learning, the key to modernization, the door to progress.

In your specific area of computer science and technology, as much as in the other fields, the fate of nations virtually hang on the balance. Economies advance on the basis of the technological improvements they introduce into machinery, products and processes.

How is our country to take part in all this?

How is our poor country to join in this great adventure that is reshaping the world we live in?

One way is obviously through trade. Openness — the free flow of goods, capital, people and knowledge — is the single biggest transmitter of technology in the world today. Trade contributes immensely to the economic growth of nations.

Therefore, it is a wise policy, indeed an imperative policy, for our country to intensify its linkage with the global economy.

A second way is education. We have to make a single-minded effort to train our young people in the ways of science and technology. We are getting left behind because we are still focused on the old learning and not enough on the new learning in the way we train our young. This is not to disparage the virtues of a liberal education, but clearly we need to expand our horizons to make scientific and technical and especially vocational education a central objective of our educational system.

Developing countries like us do not have to reinvent the wheel in order to take part in modern science and technology. We need only to encourage technology transfer in our trade and investment policies. We only have to add our own genius to what is already there.

One of the clearest lessons of Japanese and East Asian success is the value of a strategy of importing and then building on established technology. Consider for a moment how the Japanese have gotten to dominate electronics, automotive, and other industries. The VCR was invented in the west, and yet today the leading manufacturer of these is Japan. The car was first made in the us, and yet it’s Japan that’s leading the way. And it goes on with many products. And the principle is applying as well to South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

We have to tap our native genius in the same way. And one way surely is the use of computers and software development, because we Filipinos have both the manpower and the aptitude. Though we have little of capital, we have the human resources to train. And we are already linked by language to world culture.

One computer company sums up in its slogan what it is we must aspire to. It says: “the power to be your best.”

Our goal as a nation must be to awaken the best within our people, their power to make change, their genius to innovate.

Nothing would make me prouder than to be able to say that during my term, and through the promotion of science and technology, I was able to awaken the power of our people to be their best.

Tonight, I’d like to ask your organization and the companies you represent to join my administration in such a program. Let us join hands in promoting and developing science and technology in our country. And together let us reap the rewards.

Mabuhay ang Unix Users Club of the Philippines!

Thank you and good night.