Electoral Politics: the issue has a name

The stories of the local elections have been the same since time immemorial & election reform programs have not produced desired changes.
It is so deceptively simple and defies many a formula for change.

But, the issue has a name: it is patronage politics.

All things equal, people would prefer something familiar.
People will vote for someone they have access to when they are sick or when they cannot pay school fees or when they cannot pay water and electric bills.
Aside from governing through policies & programs for all, politicians must maintain a personal relationship with each voter in the village.
Elected officials are deemed source of largesse and no politician has a right to enter politics without the funding wherewithal of one’s own or from some rich patron/s who may demand behest favors during the politician’s term of office.
Still, election is a methodology of democracy and politics is the institution for crystalizing the people’s will.

Anytime is a good time to imagine how to address both the poverty of democracy & the literal poverty of our people.

Each morning during the campaign period, I always wake up with people already lining up to see me to solicit funds to defray prescriptions for medicines, or because it is fiesta time in their village or someone wants to ask money for transport or even to pay for water bills.
Most often, I tell them that under election laws, I am allowed to spend only a few pesos per voter.
Later, I delegated this explaining portion to a campaign aide.
Mostly, as we have to be in the campaign track at the crack of dawn, I was simply not available to many voters visiting me because I was going to their homes.

The poverty in the rural areas is unspeakable and during the campaign I was filled with hopes that good governance will make a difference in peoples’ lives.
It is easy to understand that poor people need the instant calories now to survive- even for just a day or two during this election fiesta - and cannot wait for poverty reduction programs that will take time to come their way.
The logic is that governance is the business of government, anyway, and promises of good governance are not edible now.
A lot of people believe that whoever is in the reins of government will abuse power.
That we have all the laws and institutions to combat corruption cannot transcend this belief.
And so, I tell myself that “hope is the triumph over experience.”

Political dynasties are still here with us because scions of politicians born and bred in a political clan are socialized into the ways of both good and bad politics and have more chances of survival.
Not many an ordinary mortal can survive the ways of politics.
Perfect examples of these mortals who cannot survive politics are those who cannot give up their intellectual freedom from the center of wealth and power.

It is a small price to pay that candidates’ privacy are always invaded to the hilt.
For the sanity of the candidate, it will be healthy to have an inviolate sacred space (whether virtual space or real space) where one can retreat and replenish vital energy which is crucial for one to be able to survive the pit of politics.

The solidarity with communities is its own reward.
I felt liking myself more that my work in the development industry has honed my skills to translate the hopes and dreams of simple people towards sustainable solutions to address their condition.
Never mind that the way to them is not a walk in the park and so far removed from one's comfort zone. After all is said & done, I remember feeling inspired when I was with these women & men whose rural homes were far from paved roads.
    ~ Isabelita Solamo

The University: Promoting Equality Through The Classroom

Going Back To The University

After decades, I have gone back to the university to teach which is a kind of renaissance for me. Friends in the academe have warned me that there is a different crop of students now. Of course, what the academicians mean is that many students today do not regard themselves as serious scholars plotting to change society and the world. Then, I saw some young student activists exercising their freedom of speech on television and their core message was about the tuition hike and the processes that should be part it.

I am teaching the social sciences (Political Science & Sociology) and I am filled with much hope that I can contribute to the mentoring of the successor generation. Some of these students will be future leaders. On the first day of class, I was trying to introduce a quality of mind that allows a student to understand one’s personal circumstance in the context of society and various institutions or what C. Wright Mills calls as the interplay between history, society and biography. It is revealing that advancements in science and technology have not solved much of the problems of humanity. Much of our problems are called social and the solutions involve changing social structures. For example, scholars are asking why is it that even as the Philippines is the most "western" country in Asia, it is also one of the poorest? China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia are performing well economically. What is it in our culture that hinders economic growth? I told my students that to say that the Filipino is lazy is a misrepresentation of social reality. But, the answer to the study of why we are still poor is a very long overdue report. Perhaps, the more incisive question is why is it that majority of our people do not have access to the wealth of our country?

Or why is it that across time, women have become subordinate to men? Ah but looking at the classroom now, I am much pleased that there are more women. But, then again, one can also accurately say that a private elite university is one of the social institutions that are accessible to one strata or class of society. The poor have been pre-excluded by virtue of their belonging to a particular class. And for the poor, the economic system has failed not just female students but male students too, and who have been excluded from school due to poverty. Which is why, one of the ideal functions of a good government is to subsidize the education of its people.

I was once asked what it was in my well rounded education that socialized me to enter the world of social development. During the activism of the 70’s when we were debating whether we wanted to be doctors, we asked ourselves, “ so when we treat a patient for malnutrition, what will happen to him or her when s/he goes back to his or her poverty?” So we said,” Let us address the poverty first by contributing our bit.” At that time and even now, the disciplines that are inspiring us and allowing us to look forward to good social change are the social sciences.


Promoting Equality Through The Classroom

I am about to go to the classroom to teach and I have to churn out words for my Wednesday column. There is so much to say and I always start up with a framework for saying things. Today, my frame of mind is about poverty and all sorts of inequality in society.

I am thinking of my two types of students in the classroom : type one is the group mesmerized and fascinated by what I am saying and investing themselves in interaction. The trick for this is the skill to evoke their interest and drawing examples relevant to their worldview and experiences; and type two is what I call the deviant few who are displaying what we call the “shut out” syndrome. Teachers in the elementary grades have a term for this: physically present but mentally absent. It is a challenge always to bring these students back to the classroom.

My topic for later is social stratification and the task is to explain how society is divided according to rank or hierarchy using various indicators that they will understand. My challenge for this is how to promote an egalitarian society given that my students are blinded by their middle or high class socio - economic status and thus have either no empathy for the poor or have aversion for being poor. Then, I remind them that the mission of the university where they are enrolled in is not only for excellence but also to serve others.

The Muslim world will observe Ramadan soon and by practice I have sort of always observed this season for years. We call it Duyog Ramadan. Particularly, in this season for this year, my colleagues will be traveling to Muslim communities about a project in the Shari’a courts and in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao but observing the holiness of the season. Some of my Muslim women friends will be doing paper work during the night and going slow during the day. I share to my class what a Muslim friend once said that the Ramadan season is, among others, a time for solidarity with the poor who have to undergo forced fasting all year round due to poverty.


Then I go about the myriad things about how wealth should be shared by all and how we should just be custodians of the earth’s resources for the next generation; and that the climate changes that we are experiencing are the consequences of the way we have treated the environment.

I will say, for instance, that in gender stratification, women have for centuries been subordinate to men and that there are rich feminists who are advocating for gender equality because they have owned the suffering of their mothers and all women before them. I guess if we are able to promote this kind if social consciousness, somehow this new generation will not allow discrimination because it is wrong. I always tell my students that all of the existing inequalities are socially constructed and amenable to social change but that change will have to involve change in institutions and structures. Institutions and structures are big words but a faster way to really change and promote new behavior is through laws and standards. I guess given that so much inequality is so well entrenched, we will have to think of more creative ways to promote an egalitarian society to a student population whose goal is to graduate from school and join society whose processes generate more inequality. This is a mission of a lifetime. And the classroom is a good place to start.

What The World Needs Now : Notes From England

England - I am here for my alumni reunion at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex.

 IDS “aims to understand and explain the world, and to try to change it- to influence as well as to inform.”

In this two day meeting, the alumni are scholarly articulating the problems of the world and plotting what development work needs to be done in a changing landscape and shifting geopolitics.

One of the major theses that needs to be communicated is that reduction of so much inequality should be done with or without the global economic crisis.

Among others, the global economic crisis is a failure of the banking and financial systems and so one proposal is not to deal with the economic crisis because to spend much time in terms of more research to produce more knowledge for something that has happened already will be derailing in many ways.
The lessons of the global economic crisis speak for themselves or to wax Latin :Res ipsa loquitor.

This call is to let the economic crisis evolve and hope it will metamorphose into a less virulent strain.
 It is more efficient to focus on something that is sure to change the world and that is to work on instruments towards reducing inequality without excluding the importance of economic growth.

The alumni are poised to embark on a project that believes that reducing inequality can be one of the solutions to the global economic crisis.
This 2009 crisis is a crisis at the core ( rich) affecting both core and periphery (poor.)
 Hubert Schmitz, IDS research fellow working on globalization, thinks that to concentrate work on the poor countries is limiting because “ concentrating on the dependent variable ‘poverty’ would cut off from understanding the dynamics which leads to shifts in poverty and prosperity.”
In short, former poor countries in East Asia which are now the so called emerging markets are driving the changes in the center.

Definitely, we need a new language or discourse or paradigm or new conversations to describe the changing development landscape.
In these uncertain times, the task is to ask the right question.
It was noted that in our management of these uncertain financial times, some of the myriad of responses are mistaken views to go exclusively global or focus exclusively on the local when the response should be integrating both the global and local.
There is a disconnect between macro and micro economics and the task is to articulate the discourse between the macro and micro or to find the middle space between the big picture and the small picture.

There is no one shared view on development perspectives.
Development policies are most often influenced by voices from positions of power and authority.
Which is why in this age of mobile phones and internet connection, it is important to hear different perspectives or to hear our own local stories of what we think the changes should be.

Making the world a better place is not a monopoly of development experts.
One challenge put forward by Professor Lawrence Haddad, head of the Institute of Development Studies is how to successfully collaborate with other voices such as the private sector, or the great majority who are very connected via information technology who are “just getting on with their work and who are not too bothered whether the self designated development experts work with them or not.”


https://www.flickr.com/photos/ids_uk/sets/72157621859137086
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ids_uk/sets/72157621859137086/

Let me share a feedback about the above piece ( What The World Needs Now)  from an economist  in Wall Street, New York  who studied at the Wharton School of business on the ailing economy of the United States :

“The US condition does not keep me awake at night, but it disturbs me...Great powers of course in most cases, do not instantly collapse (though Russia quickly unraveled not too long ago).  They tend to linger, remain relatively wealthy, though with less influence in the world.

The US dollar does bother me...It is a matter of time as to when it will experience a big decline...There might be like a sand pile phenomenon...you never know when the last grain of sand will cause the sand pile to collapse.

China will never flex its global powers until it has too.  I think it operates consistent with my view:  one should not make unnecessary enemies.  Messianic powers (e.g. US) often do...and they get conflicted between their self-interest and their messianic goals of imposing freedom and democracy.”