The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
By Riza Lozada
As is his wont, President Aquino again blamed the Philippines media for sensationalizing and blowing out of proportion much of the country’s problems under his administration. In the “A Meeting of Minds” dialogue with Forbes Media Editor-in-Chief Steve Forbes at the closing of the 15th Forbes Global CEO Conference in Manila, Mr. Aquino was asked about his views on the country’s corruption and public-order problems, which have remained the biggest concerns of foreign investors.
“The headlines don’t seem to reflect the reality,” the President said on the peace and order situation. “Our media, like any other body, like any country’s media tend to or would want to have something that is sensational. We admit, we have problems, but I don’t think our problems are disproportionate to any other country of our size and our particular status. Most of the kidnappings happen in the southern part of the Philippines, where we are in the process of trying to forge a peace agreement with the major secessionist group.”
He added: “It would be wrong to say that there is no crime in the Philippines but I think our crime situation is being addressed. There has been quite a substantial reduction of what they call ‘index crimes,’ but we are not stopping our efforts to make us as crime-free as possible.”
He also said Filipinos are under the same threats “as anybody else—drug cartels trying to penetrate our country, either to sell it to us or as transshipment points; the new white-collar crimes of identity theft is also a work in progress in terms of addressing it.” The President told Forbes of a 600-percent growth in foreign direct investments (FDI) in the country to $6.2 billion last year, although the Joint Foreign Chambers (JFC) expressed alarm recently as the FDI declined 35.2 percent during the first seven months this year compared with a year ago.
Recent figures also showed that the Philippines received only a 4.6-percent share in the total FDI that flowed into the economies of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) in the first half of the 2015. In 2014 when the total FDI in the Philippines reached $6.2 billion, which was pittance compared to Singapore’s $67.4 billion, Indonesia’s 25.7 billion, Thailand’s $11.8 billion, Malaysia’s $10.5 billion and the $6.6 billon FDI of Vietnam, which appears to have fully recovered from the 20-year war—from 1955 to 1975—that devastated its economy. Mr. Aquino also said his administration had gone beyond stopping stanching the hemorrhage in the economy to getting Filipinos inspired to participate in the development of the country. “I had no plans to run in 2009 when they were asking me. And I knew to a degree the enormity of the problems that I would confront and they were saying: ‘Stopping the hemorrhaging would be enough.’ And I think we have gone beyond stopping the hemorrhaging to actually getting our people really inspired, whereas their primary ambition before we started in office was how to get out of the Philippines,” he said.
The President also said Filipinos were now returning instead of leaving the country.“We have a reduction in our overseas foreign workers… there seems to be a sizable proportion that have gone back to the country and found meaningful employment,” he said.
But his statement appeared to contradict even the government’s own figures showing that the poverty rate hardly moved from 25 percent since the start of his presidency. Mr. Aquino also credited his administration for bringing to Filipinos a “renewed outlook and optimism,” saying this was one of the “the biggest achievements” of his administration.
“Even those who are outside of the country exhibit that, shall we say, ‘renewed pride’,” Mr. Aquino said. “The dreams are more and more becoming realities as the days go by.We think that what we have achieved currently is just a stepping-stone towards what can be achieved by the next administration because they will be starting at a better situation than what we had when we started he claimed.”