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PRESIDENTIALITIS. This is a disease that afflicts middle-aged
Filipinos, more so the political types. It is a disease, obsession
and lust. Those stricken by it live, think and breathe Malacañang.
The disease tends to unhinge people, rendering their judgment,
balance and perspective awfully off.
There is another interesting thing that binds
those who have declared their intention to run for president and
another candidate just waiting for the right time to announce his
presidential bid—real estate.
Sen. Mar Roxas is banking on the Araneta
fortune, which anchor is the giant Araneta Center in Cubao, a
mixed-use commercial complex. From Farmers Plaza just off EDSA, the
Araneta Center expand eastwards. It includes a coliseum, the Gateway
Center, an SM Mall and stretches of low-rise shopping areas. There
are BPO offices in the area now and they provide the spending power
that keeps restaurants with odd names—Rasa, Café Bol—afloat.
In a wooded area of the Araneta Center sits the
White House, which serves as the war room for the presidential
ambition of Roxas. You can’t miss the compound with the big trees
with leaves tarred by carbon monoxide and the wide space that serves
as an exercise area for fighting cocks.
Senate President Manuel Villar is a real estate
tycoon. The housing subdivisions he owns used to end with either
“la,” as in Camella or “ra,” as in Palmera. But now, there
is a sudden preference for middle-income housing sites with names
that suggest Italian or American influence.
The Araneta Complex was already an institution
during the salad years of Villar, when he was crunching numbers for
a failed investment bank and selling gravel and sand on the side.
But Villar’s real estate empire is now much bigger than the one
owned by the Aranetas.
Vice President Noli de Castro, while he does not
have a real estate empire listed under his name, goes by the name of
“Housing Czar.” He has been the point man for mass housing of
the Arroyo administration for years. He is often photographed along
railway tracks and in slum communities, mostly in the act of
awarding land titles to mass housing beneficiaries.
Mass housing contractors almost always
congregate around him, which is not a bad thing for one aspiring for
the presidency. Contractors are big political donors.
The serious students of growth and development,
those looking into trends and mega-trends, are, however, not too
comfortable with the real estate orientation of Roxas, Villar and de
Castro. This is easy to explain.
In a world where Google reigns, real
estate-based wealth is Old World and does not suggest an inclination
and disposition to search for innovation and exploring technological
and economic frontiers.
The dynamic of entrepreneurship has moved from
the boardrooms into labs, research facilities and computing
startups. In this cyber context, the fixation with real estate is
associated with times past, not with times present, not the future.
In the US last year, a real estate mess nearly wrecked the entire
economy.
Roxas, Villar and de Castro, it appears, remain
the vanguards of an old order, old business, the driver of wealth
three decades earlier but not today. With such orientation, how can
they lead us, truly and with dedication, into the economic
battlefields of the 21st century? The question is a nagging but
legitimate one and all three should be asked for their response.
Clearly, we need a president who will talk the
digitized talk and pay homage in his speeches to the wonders of
algorithm. Can three people fixated with fixed assets do this? Many
wonder. Creatures of the past often cannot cross over and cannot be
explorers, frontiersmen or innovators.
The decision of both Villar and Roxas to invoke
past politics and resuscitate dead parties—the NP and the LP—as
their respective vehicles to the presidency all the more sustains
the doubts about their capacity to blaze trails. The LP and the NP
thrived in the period of the two-party system. The present is a
multi-party political context, and the diversity and expanse is
enshrined in the Constitution. The NP and the LP should have been
archived for good.
De Castro will run under either Lakas or Kampi
and this is worse. The political light will be out of these two
parties by 2010.
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