Speech
of
His Excellency Fidel V. Ramos
President of the Philippines
At the Second University of the Philippines Lecture Series

Delivered in Quezon City, June 15, 1998]

The Philippines
comes of age

SERVING AS PRESIDENT has been the high point of my life. That the end of my term coincides with our observance of the centennial of our independence only makes me even more proud. As we undertook our labors these past six years, we were also retracing the events that led to the proclamation of Independence on June 12, 1998.

Compared with the great deeds of those heroic personages who presided at the birth of the nation, our exertions must seem prosaic. Nonetheless, I would like to believe that the Ramos Administration did not fail our country and our people during our watch. And my colleagues and I are leaving the responsibilities of office with our country more peaceful, more secure, more prosperous and more confident than when we assumed our watch. In saying this, I do not mean to preempt history’s verdict on my Presidency I mean only to respond to your request that I say something here for the record about our national journey during the past six years: the undertakings we embarked on, the challenges we had to face, and the goals we achieved.

It may seem just a memory now, but we came to office in the most inauspicious of times. Metro Manila and most of our population centers were suffering under frequent and prolonged blackouts. Amid a resurgent and modernizing Asian continent, we were “the Sick Man of Asia.”

In one paean to the Asian economic miracle which will ever remain in my library a Western journalist dismissed the Philippines as “a teenage farce” and wondered loudly whether we Filipinos will ever grow up.

Today, six years later, how insignificant those words seem; and how profoundly has our country changed! I should be the last to claim them as my personal achievements as President, but during our watch let us say the lights were turned back on; the sick man has gotten out of the hospital, and the teenage farce has grown up—and more!

Today we are a country far different from the one we were in 1992. And I daresay we stand a little closer to the national dream that animated our heroes and forebears a century ago.

Writing in 1892, in the famous essay “The Philippines a Century Hence,” Rizal prophesied:

The advancement and ethical progress of the Philippines are inevitable, are decreed by fate . . . the country will revive the maritime and mercantile life . . . and once more free . . . will recover its pristine virtues and will again become addicted to peace—cheerful, happy, joyous, hospitable and daring.

We have come through

Much of this has come to pass in the interval of a hundred years; perhaps only a few of us will disagree with Rizal’s forecast that Philippine progress was inevitable. As we all know, our journey has been hard. The burdens have been heavy. Natural calamities have often been devastating. And there were many among us who doubted whether we would ever reach our destination.

But, by dint of our collective effort, we have come through. And now we enter our second century as a republic with our people more united, the country more peaceful, our democracy stronger, and the economy in a good position to weather crisis and resume accelerated growth.

Perhaps because I am a military man by training and an engineer and builder by background, I brought to the Presidency a different view of how problems should be faced and mastered.

Where more able politicians spoke of “making our country great again” or of “giving those with less in life more in law,” I saw the challenge as one of “winning the future.”

The sterile debates between Left and Right

Trials and challenges for me are not debates over principles and dogmas. They must rather be overcome in the most pragmatic, cost-effective and fastest way.

Unless we could free ourselves from the sterile debates between Left and Right, between Utopianism and Conservatism, I believe we could never get out of the prison of poverty and underdevelopment.

Unless we could harness all the energies of our millions—from Batanes to Tawi-Tawi, from Eastern Samar to Palawan—and nurture the economy from the bottom up, we cannot modernize as a nation.

And unless we learned to use the powers of government and democratic politics to make essential reforms—and not just piecemeal changes—we would always be the laggard in East Asia.

Thus, early in my term, we embarked on an ambitious agenda of reform. Under the banner of what we have called “Philippines 2000,” we set for ourselves the goals of people empowerment and global competitiveness that would be achieved by developing a culture of excellence.

Thus, also, we set specific target dates for the achievement of our goals. Our timetable was not open-ended, because we knew that to get from here to there always involved accomplishing many tasks along the way.

Many critics have scolded me for citing too many statistics in my speeches and for daring to hold Cabinet meetings in the countryside. These were for a practical purpose. The numbers, percentages and graphs were our only way of knowing whether we were succeeding or failing in our programs. And bringing government to the grassroots was, to me, the best way of getting our local people involved and of testing whether indeed our programs were impacting on the lives of our communities.

Whatever may be said, therefore, of my Presidency, I can say truthfully that I know exactly what we did accomplish during these past six years. I always knew what was going on in terms of the commitments of the executive branch, and I saw and heard for myself the situation and expectations of our people.

A just and honorable peace with our dissidents

The specific path of reform we have followed consisted of several major links.

First, in the pursuit of peace and in nation building, we were able to forge a just and honorable peace with the Repormang Alyansang Makabansa and the Moro National Liberation Front. And, in the process, we won the respect of the world—as evidenced by our country’s being awarded the 1997 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Peace Prize.

We also talked peace with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and made headway in persuading the Communist Party of the Philippines and its National Democratic Front to rejoin the mainstream of civil society.

Through our peace and development process, we were able to create the environment needed to nurture all the other activities relevant to our economic, social and political reforms.

Second, to stabilize the economy and open the way for growth, we dismantled monopolies and cartels and leveled the playing field through a package of enabling laws to spur more domestic and foreign investments, improve our human resources, and enhance our links with other nations in the global economy.

Exit from a generation of IMF supervision

From nearly zero growth when we began in 1992, we have added—year by year—to national productivity and performance. We averaged an annual growth rate of 5 percent during 1993-97. The Asian financial turmoil notwithstanding, our economy continued to grow—our gross national product managed to increase by 2.5 percent during the first quarter of this year. Last March, we exited from 35 years of supervision by the International Monetary Fund—even while some of our neighbors are actively seeking IMF assistance for their own crisis-ridden financial systems.

Third, to distribute equitably the fruits of our development efforts, we launched the Social Reform Agenda (SRA) to help the poorest of the poor help themselves. We expanded access to quality basic services and facilities, such as primary health care, education, housing, easier credit and jobs. By raising the productivity levels of the poorest of our poor, we made the eradication of poverty and the narrowing of the gap between the haves and the have-nots the centerpiece of our development efforts.

We especially supported the 20 poorest provinces and all our fifth- and sixth-class municipalities which deserve the greatest concentration of services, while yet ensuring that the rest of the country—which needed to have their services delivered more effectively—would receive due attention. We transformed the face and smell of Smokey Mountain—once the symbol of what was wrong with the Philippines—into a model housing area with all the amenities of a commercial complex and green community, and changed the despair of scavengers into hope.

In 1992 the economy generated 781,000 new jobs. By 1996 we had created almost double that number—1,484,000 jobs—reducing the national unemployment rate from 9.8 percent to 8.4 percent as of end 1997. From 1993 to 1996 we helped 700,000 families own their homes. By the time I step down from the Presidency, we shall have provided housing assistance to 1.2 million households. In health, life expectancy increased from 66 years in 1992 to 69 years in 1995.

Institutionalizing social reform

The sum of all these development indicators is that over these past six years, poverty has declined—from 40 percent of all Filipino families in 1990 to 35 percent in 1994, and further down to about 30 percent this June. Over the period 1992 to 1997, our per capita income increased from $800 to $1,240.

We have, in fact, institutionalized the SRA with the recent passage of the Social Reform and Poverty Alleviation Act (R.A. 8425). It is in this way that we reached out to the poorest of our people—and brought them into a widening circle of development.

Fourth, in support of our Medium-term National Development Program, we expanded and upgraded our highways, telecommunications, transport, energy and other public infrastructures.

From 1992 to 1998 we completed the construction and upgrading of 36,050 kilometers of roads and 45,464 lineal meters of bridges. We rehabilitated the Philippine National Railways main south line all the way to Albay—especially the final leg from Naga City to Legaspi City which had been non-operational since 1986—and revived the Pasig River ferry service to promote the use of inland waterways as an alternative mode of transportation.

Linking up the major island grids

In Metro Manila we have built or are building modern infrastructure, including the circumferential road known as C-5, two more Light Rail Transit systems, the Manila Skyway, the New Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal, and additional international airports in Subic, Clark, General Santos and Zamboanga City.

We started interlinking the major island grids into one national power grid by completing the Leyte-Cebu interconnection last year and the Leyte-Luzon interconnection this year. Not only have we increased the country’s energy output to 11,500 megawatts from a mere 6,950 megawatts in 1992. We also increased the use of indigenous sources of energy, such as gas, geothermal, coal and hydro to reduce our dependence on oil-based power plants.

Fifth, to ensure that our development is sustainable, we vigorously carried out programs and projects to protect our environment and conserve our natural resources. Such critical areas as the Tubathaha and Apo Reefs, Boracay and the Ifugao Rice Terraces are being protected and rehabilitated under our National Integrated Protected Areas system while we continue to clean large bodies of water, such as Laguna de Bay, Taal Lake and Lake Lanao.

Sixth, recognizing the indispensable role of government, we continued to streamline our bureaucracy and infuse it with a more competent, motivated, productive and creative personnel service force. We have adopted the widespread use of telecommunications and information technology to improve public service delivery and to reduce processing time in Government offices.

Seventh, to restore our country to a place of respect in the community of nations, we embarked on an intensive foreign relations campaign based on economic diplomacy and the internationally shared goals of freedom, peace and prosperity.

We pressed for cooperation within the international community in addressing new and urgent global issues, such as international terrorism and other transnational crimes, especially the illicit global trade in dangerous drugs and the illegal traffic in and criminal exploitation of women and children.

Bringing government closer to people

We expanded our global linkages by building and strengthening partnerships and developing new ones with countries that no Philippine head of state had ever visited. Thus my foreign trips, which have been much criticized, were necessary. And the costs surely were exceeded a hundred-fold by the returns—not the least of which are in the improved protection of overseas Filipino workers and unprecedented foreign investments in our country.

As for my travels around our country, which I undertook even on weekends and holidays, few are aware of how significant and extensive these have been. In six years I made more than 600 provincial trips, or an average of two times a week—far more than that of any previous administration—and held 45 regional Cabinet meetings in key cities and towns. And I didn’t do this just to prove my stamina or to satisfy any wanderlust. My object was to bring government truly closer to the people, to feel their pulse, to know their concerns, to solve problems on the spot whenever possible, and to fast-track projects by reducing or removing bottlenecks.

To put more permanence into our reforms, we ensured that these were supported by 228 legislative reform measures, many of them interwoven into various international agreements. This record number of laws passed was made possible by the mechanism called the Legislative-Executive Development Advisory Council, which we created under R. A. 7640 to ensure a harmonious and productive working relationship with Congress.

Some wonder whether these reforms and achievements will endure into the new century—considering that Asia today is in profound crisis.

I will answer that we are faring better than our neighbors during this time of turmoil precisely because of these reforms and achievements. And we will be among the first to recover when this crisis finally blows over, as it must inevitably.

We are on the side of history

In a way, the present crisis proves that in choosing democracy over authoritarianism, we Filipinos were on the side of history. For in this time of extraordinary change in the world, it is a fact that democracy and the free-market system go together. Some Asian economies are in agony mainly because of their lack of transparency and democratic controls.

The process of change will continue in the world community and the global economy. And I daresay that success will come to us if we can combine the democratic virtues of transparency and accountability with the Asian virtues of thrift and hard work.

Today, in this year of our centennial of nationhood, we should celebrate the fact that the Philippines is a truly functioning democracy. We have just successfully concluded national elections that elected a new President, a new legislature, and new local governments. Despite vigorous political competition, the institutions of government are intact and have found virtually universal acceptance throughout the country. From the barangays to Malacañang—from the new legislature to the new local governments—those who make and enforce the decisions of government answer to those whom their decisions affect. The harmonious transfer of the presidency from me to President-elect Joseph Ejercito Estrada will take place on June 30, 1998, as scheduled, and as I guaranteed.

Despite the Asian crisis, our economic transformation continues, even now as we stand on the edge of a change of government. I believe we have discarded forever the protectionist policies of the past, and the integration of our economy with the world is irreversible.

The economic revolution is irreversible

The economic revolution—like the political revolution—is already too advanced to be reversed. Our political institutions have allowed a democratic culture to grow and flourish. In the past five years, we have built economic institutions—in finance, trade, industry, labor, agrarian reform and agriculture—that have started to replace the age-old culture of graft, consumption and privilege with one of honesty, thrift and risk. But we have more work to do. Many challenges remain. Weaknesses in the economy must be corrected. The tax system must ensure that every citizen and corporation pays the right amount of taxes at the proper time. To bring the bureaucracy in line with national modernization, the reorganization of government and the rooting out of corrupt officials must continue. The education of young Filipinos—the most important resource we have—must be given the highest priority. And we must never forget the high importance of our relations with the world—with nations far and near.

Perhaps, I am already treading on the turf of the next administration—so let me now summarize and conclude.

Looking back over the past six years, I believe we have come through because we trusted in the capacity of democratic government and an empowered citizenry to renew our national life, and because we learned to apply pragmatic solutions to the most critical problems of our national life.

We look to the future optimistically

Democracy and the steady course we have followed have brought us new confidence and long-term stability that have accelerated—not retarded—our economic progress. We look to the future with the optimism that comes from faith in the people’s knowledge and certainty that they—not presidents—rule.

Only history can distinguish between the enduring and the transient accomplishments of my Administration. But perhaps you will allow me to take encouragement from a recent cover story in Time magazine which declared in its title: “The Philippines: After 100 Years of Independence, Things Are Looking Up,” and commented: “In his nearly completed six-year term, President Fidel Ramos has revolutionized the Philippine economy, making it a contender for prosperity at last.”

I am flattered by the praise, but we all know better. Our people and our Government, our business sector and our workers, and all our local communities did it together. We dared to emplace reform. We put our shoulders to the wheel and the plow. And we turned things around for our country.