i Report Issue No. 3 2005 - Philippine Center for Investigative ...

V O I C E S F R O M T H E P E R I P H E R Y
SHIFTS IN THINKING
Over the past century, claims
on local power by Cebuano
leaders have been expressed in
three ways: exercising control
over local territory, usually limited
to a municipality or district
(classic “bossism”); carving out
a base to leverage national influence
(which includes alliance
building and indirect power
over a more extensive territory
like a region); or building “autonomous
regions” (in relations
of avoidance or negotiation
with the central government).
I would like to think that there
has been through time a shift
from one pole to the other (at
least in Cebu’s case), a shift
among local and regional leaders
from “thinking nationally”
(using a local base for a raid
on national power) to “thinking
regionally” (seeing the region
as itself a meaningful, sufficient,
and effective arena for political
action). It is a sea of change that
fosters political conditions more
favorable to federalism. This is
true not only of the Osmeñas. It
may be noted that major political
leaders in the region are supportive
of federalism.
We are speaking not just of
the self-interested maneuvers
of political leaders. “Regional
thinking” is part of a public,
region-based consciousness of
separateness and difference.
Regional autonomist sentiment
is illustrated, for instance, in the
Pusyon Bisaya phenomenon of
the martial-law period. In the
1978 elections for the Interim
National Assembly, 13 seats were
contested in the Central Visayas.
A ragtag opposition group called
Pusyon Bisaya fielded a slate of
relative unknowns against a stellar
ticket of Marcos’s Kilusang
Bagong Lipunan that included
the biggest political leaders of
the region (Osmeña, Durano,
Cuenco, Gullas). In a wave of
popular, anti-dictatorship sentiment,
Pusyon Bisaya wiped out
Marcos’s candidates, 13 to 0. An
observer at that time said, “Even
if the opposition had fielded a
dog against the Marcos candidates,
the dog would have won.”
This was in 1978, at the height of
martial rule. What has not been
well noted is that the first public
manifestations of middle-class
protest against the dictatorship
took place in the Central Visayas
even before the 1983 Aquino
assassination.
Autonomist sentiments became
pronounced in the late 1980s
during the so-called “Ce-Boom”
when, in a national context of
negative growth, Cebu became the
country’s fastest growing economy.
The Central Visayas gross domestic
product posted an average growth
rate of 17.4 percent from 1987 to
1991. Though this tapered off to
11.5 percent in 1992-1997, it fueled
a can-do attitude among Cebuano
and other Visayan leaders.
This show of autonomy began
even before martial rule when
Cebuano leaders tried to build on
self-initiative to develop the local
economy independent of Manila.
An example is the “Island in the Pacific”
tourism promotion campaign
that marketed Cebu as though it
was not part of the Philippines.
After the fall of Marcos, riding the
crest of market optimism, Cebuano
and other Central Visayan leaders
BITING THE BAIT. Many in the
provinces support the president’s
suggestion to shift to a federal
form of government.
launched initiatives to promote
the regional economy independent
of Manila, even envisioning
(in a flush of hubris) Cebu as a
global city (“like Hong Kong or
Singapore”) delinked from the
Philippines. The attitude of Manila-defiant
entrepreneurship is
expressed by a Cebuano leader
who, when warned that a project
may not get Manila’s approval,
said, “If Manila does not approve,
we’ll go ahead anyway.”
CENTERS AND
ENCLAVES
A major concern in the creation
of federal states is that this will
lead to the entrenchment of
bossism and dynastic enclaves.
Center-periphery conflicts will
also persist, although relocated
to the regional level.
Bossism will continue to be
a problem. There are factors,
however, that will contribute to
its enervation or mutation: the
strengthening of state institutions,
regional economic development,
and continued efforts in decentralization
and development initiatives
that give primacy to community
mobilization and participatory approaches.
These factors will have
greater efficacy or force if played
out in a federal (rather than unitary)
context where negotiations
are close range rather than long
distance, external interventions are
held in check, and demands for accountability
and transparency can
be exercised more effectively.
Consider the current controversy
over the division of
Cebu province into four separate
provinces. Spearheaded by three
congressional representatives
who want to carve out their
districts into separate provinces,
the bill to create “four Cebus” has
been filed in Congress and set
for committee hearings in July.
Here one has a case of districtlevel
bosses who aim to combine
local control with access to the
national legislature (with its traditional
practice of horse trading
on bills of “local application”)
in order to gain greater share of
local and national resources and,
in the process, carve out local
fiefdoms. A federal system will
not forestall conflicts of this kind
but may provide a better context
in dealing with the problem.
In Central Visayas, centermargin
tensions have already
been manifested in complaints
about “imperial Cebu.” In the late
1980s, Negros Occidental Gov.
Emilio Macias II, smarting at Cebu’s
dominance, demanded that the
province pay “tribute” for its use
of power from a geothermal plant
in Negros Oriental. In 1995, Boholanos
resisted a Cebu-initiated plan
to build a 30-km undersea pipeline
that would pump water daily from
the Inabanga River in Bohol to
storage facilities in Mactan.
INTERDEPENDENCE
DESPITE IMBALANCE
While these examples point to
intraregional imbalance, they
also underline the reality of intraregional
interdependence. Despite
its primacy, land-poor, water- and
energy-deficient Cebu needs, to
put in crudely, a “hinterland.”
(Shopping malls in Cebu, for
instance, have profited from highspeed
ferries transporting shoppers
from neighboring islands.)
Moreover, economic changes
like improved transport and communications,
greater capital mobility,
and flexible business siting
(as the new economy opens up
new production sites, e.g. from
coal mines to call centers) will
affect the base of local bosses by
allowing new areas to be opened
for development and hence be
empowered politically. The expansion
of tourism in Bohol and
plans to market Negros Oriental
as an information technology hub
will empower these provinces in
relation to Cebu. Some Cebuano
leaders have already put forth
the idea that if a “Federal State
of Central and Eastern Visayas”
were to be created, they would
support locating the state capital
in Leyte to prime development in
eastern Visayas and open a new
corridor connecting the region to
both Luzon and Mindanao.
All this may be an overly optimistic
view but when one does
not find much cause for optimism
looking toward Manila, one has
to look for it elsewhere.
Over 100 years ago, Jose Rizal
had a vision of the country as a
single, healthy, vitally functioning
nervous system, a highly intricate
but wonderfully coordinated network
in which neurological impulses
travel throughout the body,
to and from the cortex, the stem,
the senses, processing what comes
in from outside as well as what
happens within the body itself.
This centralized, unitary system
is not working. The forebrain
is diseased, the spinal
column eroded, the senses disoriented
or deadened. There is a
nervousness coursing throughout
the system, a chronic state
of instability, but parts of the
body are not quite sure what is
happening, and are not moving
according to the same signals.
Today it seems the body
politic is all “nervousness” and
no system. It is time the body is
reconfigured.
Resil Mojares is based in Cebu
and has authored several books
on Philippine politics, history,
and literature.
PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM
I REPORT
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