A SHIPYARD IS A TEST OF THE STATE
Why Philippine shipbuilding needs more than less red tape
By Karl M. Garcia
A shipyard is an unusual place to measure the quality of government.
It is a factory, engineering complex, workplace, logistics node and maritime asset. But it is also a test of something less visible:
Can government make its own institutions work together?
That question matters because the Philippines already has a substantial shipbuilding and ship-repair industry. The OECD describes a dual structure: large, export-oriented, foreign-owned shipyards on one side, and a much larger domestic repair-oriented sector on the other. About 95% of Philippine shipyards primarily engage in maintenance and repair.
The Philippines therefore does not simply need more shipyards.
It needs more maritime industrial capability.
And that begins with making government—and the industry itself—work more coherently.
The industry we actually have
The Philippine shipbuilding story is often told through its largest yards.
That is understandable. Tsuneishi Cebu and the former Hanjin facility in Subic accounted for the overwhelming majority of Philippine shipbuilding production measured in compensated gross tonnage between 2000 and 2024.
But that is not the whole industry.
The domestic base is much more dispersed, and most facilities are focused on repair and maintenance.
That distinction matters.
The Philippines has demonstrated that it can build sophisticated vessels for international markets.
But much of the industry’s economic base remains ship repair, maintenance, conversion and retrofit.
That is not necessarily a weakness.
It may be the foundation from which deeper industrial capability can be built.
Repair is already a regional business
Philippine yards have a significant position in regional ship repair. The OECD estimates that Philippine yards account for about 64% of domestic repair demand and 53% of foreign repair demand in its dataset.
Repair activity creates industrial learning.
It requires welders, pipefitters, electricians, machinists, marine engineers, naval architects, fabricators, electronics specialists, inspectors and project managers.
It creates relationships with suppliers.
It creates familiarity with classification standards.
It creates engineering knowledge.
And increasingly, it creates opportunities to install energy-saving and environmental technologies on existing ships.
The objective should therefore not simply be:
more ships built in the Philippines.
It should be:
more maritime value created in the Philippines.
The infrastructure problem
There is, however, a physical constraint.
The OECD estimates that approximately 66% of 186 shipyard facilities require rehabilitation. Many facilities remain dependent on relatively basic infrastructure, while more advanced facilities are concentrated among higher-class yards. The industry also faces limited domestic production of marine equipment, dependence on imported components and insufficient economies of scale.
A shipyard cannot become globally competitive if too many critical inputs have to come from elsewhere.
The real target is therefore an industrial ecosystem:
Steel.
Marine engines.
Electrical systems.
Propulsion.
Paints and coatings.
Navigation equipment.
Fabrication.
Engineering.
Classification.
Software.
Finance.
Training.
Repair.
Recycling.
And customers.
The ship itself is only the visible product.
The ecosystem is the real industry.
Repair may be the nearer industrial opportunity
There is a tendency to regard ship repair as secondary to shipbuilding.
Economically, that may be a mistake.
Repair is where local yards can develop capabilities without immediately competing with the world’s largest newbuilding economies on price and scale.
A vessel already exists. The customer needs it back in service.
Location, turnaround time, technical skill and reliability therefore matter enormously.
This creates an opportunity to move progressively up the value chain:
repair → conversion → retrofit → specialized construction → higher-value newbuilding.
That is more realistic than assuming that a policy announcement will suddenly recreate a mass export shipbuilding industry.
Green shipbuilding is already appearing
The transition to lower-emission shipping adds another opening.
The OECD reports that about 25% of vessels scheduled for completion in the Philippines in 2026 were expected to be alternative-fuel capable.
Tsuneishi Cebu provides a concrete example.
In January 2026, Tsuneishi Heavy Industries (Cebu) delivered the BRAVE PIONEER, described by Tsuneishi Shipbuilding as the world’s first methanol dual-fuelled KAMSARMAX bulk carrier.
The industrial question is whether this remains an isolated achievement or becomes a platform for technology transfer, local engineering, supplier development, workforce upgrading, retrofit capability and research.
That is the difference between hosting a factory and building an industry.
Tsuneishi also shows the limits of the red-tape argument
Consider the proposed Tsuneishi ship-recycling facility in Hinoba-an, Negros.
The roughly US$300-million project encountered land-acquisition and legal issues, as well as environmental and community concerns.
The lesson should not be that bureaucracy alone killed the project.
That would be too simple.
A major industrial investment moves through multiple systems:
land,
environment,
local government,
utilities,
infrastructure,
financing,
community relations,
national permits,
and technical regulation.
An investor experiences those as one investment pathway.
Government experiences them as separate mandates.
That gap is where friction accumulates.
This is why regulatory reform matters.
But it is also why regulatory reform by itself is insufficient.
The real problem is fragmentation
This is the significance of the proposed ARTA-MARINA reforms for the Shipbuilding and Ship Repair sector.
The current reform agenda includes a “Submit Once” approach, parallel processing, unified tracking, a proposed SBSR One-Stop Shop and interoperable digital systems. MARINA has emphasized that streamlining is not intended to weaken safety or regulatory standards.
The principle is straightforward:
streamlining should mean fewer unnecessary steps, not weaker standards.
Shipbuilding is a safety-critical industry.
Ships carry passengers, crews, cargo and fuel.
Shipyards involve heavy machinery, welding, chemicals, hazardous materials and environmental risks.
The answer to bureaucracy cannot therefore be deregulation.
It should be coherent regulation.
Remove duplicate information.
Coordinate inspections where legally and technically possible.
Standardize requirements.
Digitize transactions.
Provide predictable timelines.
Preserve safety, environmental and technical standards.
Bureaucracy has an industrial price
Regulation costs more than the fee attached to a government form.
It consumes engineering hours, management time, consultants, equipment utilization and capital.
An ARTA review identified 50 information obligations and 134 administrative steps, with estimated compliance costs of about ₱492.5 million. One processing-time measure was targeted for reduction from 112.7 days to 87.66 days.
These are not abstract administrative numbers.
For an industrial company, time is capital.
Every unnecessary delay affects production schedules, equipment utilization, vessel availability and investment decisions.
The question is therefore not simply:
How much does bureaucracy cost government?
It is:
How much economic value is lost because government cannot process information as efficiently as the companies it expects to process steel, engines and cargo?
“Submit Once” should mean once-only government
This is where the reform can become much bigger than shipbuilding.
If government already has information that another government agency is legally entitled to use, why should the applicant become the courier?
A shipyard should not repeatedly submit corporate information, registrations, certifications or other records simply because those records sit in another government database.
The applicant should provide what government genuinely does not have.
Government should retrieve what government already has.
That is the principle of once-only government.
Estonia’s X-Road offers a useful architectural analogy.
It is not one enormous government database. It is a secure data-exchange architecture that allows independently operated systems to communicate while retaining control of their own data.
Its deeper lesson is:
distributed data + standardized exchange + controlled access + authentication + auditability.
The Philippines does not need to copy Estonia.
It needs to solve the same underlying problem in a Philippine context.
PhilSys is identity; interoperability is connectivity
The Philippines already has an important component through PhilSys, established under Republic Act No. 11055.
But identity and interoperability are different things.
PhilSys establishes identity.
Interoperability establishes connectivity.
A national ID helps government answer:
Who is this person?
An interoperability architecture helps authorized systems answer:
Which institution holds the information needed for this transaction?
The country does not need one giant database containing everything about every Filipino and every company.
It needs many systems that can securely talk to one another.
One-stop should mean one process
Imagine a shipyard applying for a complex project.
Instead of repeatedly submitting corporate information to different agencies, the applicant could authorize government systems to retrieve verified information directly from authoritative sources, where legally permitted.
The architecture could eventually connect, as appropriate:
MARINA — maritime and shipyard information
SEC — corporate registration
BIR — taxpayer information
LGUs — local permits and taxation
DENR — environmental information
BOI/PEZA — investment and incentives
DOLE — labor-related regulation
Customs — import and export information
The point is not that every agency should see everything.
It is the opposite.
Access must be based on purpose, legal authority and least privilege.
Sensitive information must remain protected.
Transactions must be logged.
Data exchanges must be auditable.
A one-stop shop should therefore not mean several agency counters hidden behind one website.
It should mean:
one application, multiple lawful government processes operating in parallel.
That is genuine process reform.
Privacy and cybersecurity are part of the infrastructure
Interoperability raises legitimate concerns.
Connecting databases can increase efficiency.
It can also increase the consequences of poor access controls, bad data quality or cybersecurity failures.
The answer is not to keep every system permanently disconnected.
It is to build stronger governance around connectivity.
Data should remain appropriately distributed.
Access should be authenticated and authorized.
Exchanges should be protected.
Sensitive transactions should be auditable.
The real architecture is:
technology + law + cybersecurity + governance + auditability.
That is institutional infrastructure.
Do not simply buy X-Road
There is another danger.
Governments sometimes confuse software acquisition with institutional transformation.
The Philippines could deploy an interoperability platform and still have dysfunctional digital government if agencies maintain incompatible standards, poor-quality data, weak interfaces or organizational resistance to lawful data sharing.
The difficult work is organizational.
A national interoperability architecture needs:
Common architecture — shared technical standards.
Authoritative data — clearly designated sources of truth.
Common standards — compatible names, addresses, identifiers and records.
Strong identity — with PhilSys as a potential foundation.
Auditability — clear records of who accessed what, under whose authority and for what purpose.
Without data discipline, interoperability merely allows bad information to travel faster.
Start with high-value connections
The Philippines should resist the temptation to build another giant national IT project.
Start with high-value transactions:
business registration,
property,
social protection,
education,
health,
disaster response,
and shipbuilding.
Each successful connection becomes another segment of a national digital road.
The objective is not one enormous system.
It is a common language for government systems.
The archipelago makes this more important
The Philippines is not Estonia.
It is an archipelago of thousands of islands, with multiple administrative layers and more than 42,000 barangays.
Physical geography already imposes enormous transaction costs.
Government should not add another layer through disconnected institutions.
We have spent years digitizing government agencies.
But there is a danger that we have simply digitized the silos:
one database per agency,
one portal per department,
one application per program.
The result can be digital government without integrated government.
Interoperability changes the question.
Instead of:
“How do we digitize this agency?”
government asks:
“How does this agency participate in the national digital ecosystem?”
That is the deeper transformation.
From ease of doing business to ease of building
The Philippines has spent years pursuing the ease of doing business.
An industrial economy needs something more ambitious:
the ease of building.
Can a company build a ship?
Expand a shipyard?
Install equipment?
Import machinery?
Secure environmental approvals?
Train workers?
Connect utilities?
Obtain financing?
And move through government without repeatedly carrying the same information between offices?
These are not separate problems.
They are one industrial journey.
Ship recycling is another test of capability
Ship breaking is currently a small part of the Philippine maritime industrial base.
The opportunity should not be to compete through the weakest standards of the global recycling market.
It should be safe, environmentally sound ship recycling.
The Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships entered into force in June 2025. The Philippines has been working with the IMO on safe ship-recycling preparedness and implementation.
That could create a niche based not on cheap labor alone but on compliance, traceability and environmental standards.
But a modern recycling industry requires suitable yards, hazardous-material handling, trained workers, environmental controls, certification, monitoring and enforcement.
The lesson is consistent:
standards without capability produce exclusion; capability without standards produces risk.
The objective is both.
The most uncomfortable problem: who will design the ships?
There is one issue that deserves far more attention than it receives.
We do not have enough naval architects.
This is not speculation.
MARINA’s Maritime Industry Development Plan explicitly identifies the paucity of naval architects in shipyards and the shortage of instructors for naval-architecture education as problems affecting the production of indigenous expertise.
The OECD’s 2025 review reaches the same broader conclusion. It identifies skills gaps, high dropout rates in maritime higher education, insufficient specialized training, the absence of some postgraduate programs—including naval architecture—and the departure of skilled professionals for better opportunities abroad.
This should make us uncomfortable.
Because a shipyard is not simply a steel fabrication shop beside deep water.
A ship is a complex engineered structure.
Someone has to design it.
Someone has to calculate stability.
Someone has to understand structural loads, displacement, trim and buoyancy.
Someone has to integrate propulsion, machinery, electrical systems, cargo requirements and safety standards.
Someone has to evaluate modifications and conversions.
Someone has to take professional responsibility for the engineering.
That is where naval architects become indispensable.
How do we operate—and survive?
This is where the issue becomes bigger than employment.
The Philippines is an archipelago.
Ships are not optional infrastructure.
They connect islands, move food and fuel, support fisheries and tourism, serve ports, carry passengers and cargo, and provide the physical link between geographically separated communities.
We therefore need people who can design, build, inspect, maintain, convert and safely operate the vessels on which the country depends.
No joke:
we should worry about this.
A country can import steel.
It can import engines.
It can purchase software.
It can attract foreign shipyard investors.
But if it continually depends on foreign or externally trained expertise for critical maritime engineering, its industrial capability remains shallow.
That is particularly dangerous when the country is trying to modernize its fleet, expand ship repair, enter green propulsion, develop ship recycling and eventually build higher-value vessels.
The question is not merely:
How many shipyard workers do we have?
It is:
How many experienced professionals can design, engineer, supervise and develop the next generation of Philippine maritime assets?
We need a talent pipeline, not just more graduates
The answer is not simply to tell universities to produce more naval architects.
We need a complete pipeline:
students → graduates → apprentices → professional practice → specialization → senior engineers → instructors → researchers → industry leaders.
Every link matters.
If students cannot afford to finish, the pipeline breaks.
If there are too few instructors, it breaks.
If graduates leave immediately for better opportunities abroad, it breaks.
If shipyards cannot offer structured professional development, it breaks.
If experienced naval architects retire without transferring knowledge, it breaks.
And if universities and industry operate separately, curricula can fall behind actual industrial requirements.
This is why CHED, MARINA, universities, shipyards, professional organizations and industry need to work as one workforce-development system.
The same principle applies beyond naval architects.
The country needs marine engineers, naval engineers, welders, pipefitters, electricians, machinists, marine surveyors, inspectors, designers, project managers and increasingly specialists in alternative fuels, automation and digital ship design.
The shipyard of the future will not be labor-intensive in the old sense.
It will be skill-intensive.
The diaspora is both asset and warning
The Filipino maritime diaspora should not be viewed only as a loss.
It is also a reservoir of knowledge.
Experienced Filipino naval architects and marine engineers abroad could contribute through visiting-professor programs, technical fellowships, joint research, remote design reviews, short-term industry assignments and structured return programs.
But there is a larger question:
Why should the Philippines continually educate scarce maritime professionals only to export them?
The answer cannot be to prevent people from leaving.
It should be to make staying, returning or periodically contributing to the domestic industry economically and professionally worthwhile.
A serious industrial policy needs a return-and-reinvest strategy for technical talent.
Automation will not solve this
Artificial intelligence, computer-aided design, simulation and digital twins will change naval architecture.
They may make professionals more productive.
They will not eliminate the need for professional judgment.
Someone still has to define the engineering problem, validate assumptions, interpret results, understand operating conditions and take responsibility for the final design.
Digital tools can accelerate engineering.
They cannot substitute for an engineering profession.
The future shipyard therefore needs both:
digital systems and human expertise.
The maritime industrial stack
This is why the ARTA-MARINA reform should not be treated as an isolated anti-red-tape exercise.
MARINA’s Maritime Industry Development Plan 2028 already points toward shipyard modernization, R&D, eco-industrial maritime parks, financing and incentives, ship recycling, ancillary industries, green shipyards and workforce development.
These elements form an industrial stack:
Regulation
↓
Digital interoperability
↓
Infrastructure
↓
Skills
↓
Technology
↓
Suppliers
↓
Finance
↓
Markets
↓
Higher-value maritime production
Fix one layer and the effect is limited.
Connect several and the economics can change.
Government procurement should build capability
Government can also help create demand.
The objective should not be indiscriminate protectionism.
It should be capability accumulation.
Where public procurement can legitimately support domestic capability, contracts can incorporate training, engineering participation, maintenance capability, technology development and lifecycle support.
The question is not simply:
Who built the vessel?
It is:
What capabilities did the Philippine economy acquire from building, operating and maintaining it?
A vessel is an asset.
A maritime industrial ecosystem is a capability.
Measure outcomes, not portals
The test of reform is not a better-looking website.
It is what happens to the transaction.
How long does it take?
How many times must information be submitted?
How many inspections occur?
How many can legally be coordinated?
How many transactions are completed digitally?
How much administrative cost disappears?
Do shipyards expand?
Does repair and retrofit activity grow?
Do domestic suppliers emerge?
Do workers acquire higher-value skills?
Does productivity improve?
Does the Philippines capture more of the value chain?
And, crucially:
Are we producing enough of the professionals who can sustain the system?
Those are the metrics that matter.
The state is part of infrastructure
A shipyard cannot operate efficiently if ports are dysfunctional, power is unreliable, suppliers are weak, skilled workers are unavailable or government agencies repeatedly demand the same information.
The state is therefore not external to industrial infrastructure.
The state is part of it.
Good regulation is infrastructure.
Predictable permitting is infrastructure.
Interoperable government systems are infrastructure.
Reliable registries are infrastructure.
Digital identity is infrastructure.
Cybersecurity is infrastructure.
Professional education is infrastructure.
A naval-architecture pipeline is infrastructure.
For decades, infrastructure has meant concrete, steel and asphalt.
The next stage requires another category:
institutional and human-capital infrastructure.
The real reform is bigger than the JMC
The immediate problem is red tape.
The deeper problem is fragmentation.
The physical problem is ageing infrastructure.
The industrial problem is weak supply chains.
The human-capital problem is a shortage of specialized professionals.
The strategic problem is dependence on capabilities we do not sufficiently reproduce at home.
The larger opportunity is interoperability.
The ultimate objective is industrial capability.
A shipyard is a test of the state—not because government should build every ship, and not because regulation should disappear, but because a modern maritime industry requires institutions capable of coordinating without forcing investors to coordinate them.
And it requires a country capable of producing the people who make the entire system work.
That is the part we should not joke about.
If we do not have enough naval architects, marine engineers and highly skilled shipyard professionals, how exactly do we build, repair, modernize and safely operate the ships on which an archipelagic nation depends?
That question belongs at the center of Philippine shipbuilding policy.
Because ultimately, the most important component of a shipyard is not the dry dock.
It is the capability inside the people who know what to do with it.
And if that capability is not being replenished fast enough, the country should worry—now, while there is still time to fix it.
I took the plans for an aluminium boat from Europe and tried to get the hull fabricated with an experienced yard in Cebu. The offers I got were about double the cost of building it in Europe. Cheap labour, anyone?
Ofcourse, I did not go ahead with my plans.
My uncle had a multihull fast passenger craft build in Australia (alu hull, fibreglass top, 2*750kW Caterpillar) and sailed it from Australia to Philippines and in spite of import taxes, he saved about half.
Shipbuilding in Philippines has problems with realism. Discussions with local yards were nowhere near the professionalism shown by foreign yards.
It is rediculous that new vessels from Indonesia are cheaper than 10 year old vessels from Philippines.
Also, it is funny that Korea and Japan implemented stricter rules for passenger vessels after some big accidents and the non-compliant vessels are now functioning as “high class” vessels in Philippines. Life is cheap in Philippines. That is: Your Life….
A lost opportunity to boost Philippine shipbuilding quality.
Anyway, having worked for a while at a Korean shipyard, I saw that Philippines has got no chance to compete. Korea is miles and miles ahead, even European shipyards only can complete in the “Steve Jobbs and Jeff Bezos class” of vessels, where cost is not the prime parameter.
If I look at other regional shipyards, Philippines only would have a chance in the small-vessel class if the government would push ALL the issues mentioned in the blog. With a vengeance.
And until then, our local fishermen empty the seas with their wooden vessels, passenger boats keep sinking and cargo vessels look as if they came from the 19th century.
Just go island hopping in Greece and you maybe get the idea.
Always glad that you could share your valuable experiences here. Hope the room for improvement shrinks.
Thanks for sharing, Pablo. We try to see the glass as half full. Nice to have a reality check now and then.
A fact little known in the Philippines today is that the post-War Philippine steel industry was set up in 1952 with state-owned National Shipyard and Steel Corporation (NASSCO) in Iligan, long before the South Korean POSCO which was founded in 1968. Heading into the 1960s the “shipyard” part of NASSCO was already largely a failure, then deemphasized. By 1963 NASSCO was privatized. In 1974 the then-private NASSCO was absorbed into the Marcos Sr. era National Steel Corporation (NSC). NSC was one of the post-Marcos Sr. era state-owned casualties, sold to the Malaysians in 1995 then liquidated by 2000 following the Asian Financial Crisis. The Philippine steel industry, first through NASSCO then with NSC, never had a stable strategic owner or a consistent Philippine government policy backing it across five decades.
At one time (1970s-early 1990s) the Philippines boasted the largest steel mill in all of Southeast Asia. The Philippines held a virtual global monopoly on hot-rolled steel plate, suitable for shipbuilding plate (ferries, barges, cargo vessels) and structural steel that constructed the early modern Manila skyline. Cold-rolled plate enabled higher domestic content in Philippine-built cars and trucks, refrigerators, washing machines and dryers, air conditioners and electric fans. The Philippine canning industry sourced tinplated steel cans from Philippine steel mills for exported canned goods like soft drink cans, canned milk, sardines, corned beef, and canned fruit. Then everything collapsed.
In contrast in South Korea, POSCO was directed via government incentives that held stable across administrations to form a base for domestic needs first, not exports. POSCO enabled the South Korean auto industry, shipbuilding industry, defense industry, the appliance export industry, the rapid modernization of Seoul and other South Korean cities. The South Koreans built industrial capacity AHEAD of industrial demand, using domestic demand similar to the Japanese “Three Treasures” model and only exporting when the domestic market was saturated, whereas the Philippines played catch up on capacity AFTER demand was too obvious to ignore (then failing to ride the wave since others were better positioned and ready).
The real kick in the gut is that South Korea not only recruited Japanese maritime engineers and shipyard technicians in the 1960s and 1970s, but heavily recruited American-trained Filipino maritime engineers and technicians.
Today the Philippine shipbuilding industry mainly exists in SEZs like Subic or Cebu, mainly contributing Philippine labor, building foreign designs, using imported components, for foreign owners. Domestic shipbuilding outside of SEZs is mostly in building fishing vessels (about 30%-ish from what I’ve read).
In my career across many “hats” worn in various industries that don’t seem to have anything similar, the common area of expertise is that of SEQUENCING, as I am essentially a sequencing expert. Sequencing not only requires sound planning, but also consistent execution. The main way I can see the Philippine shipbuilding industry getting out of contributing mainly labor is if the Philippines starts setting domestic sourcing requirements sequenced to training a suitable workforce to replace foreign experts, with an industrial base to match. It could even be done with foreign investment (it’s not like the South Koreans or China did it solely on their own domestic investment).
The problem Philippine shipbuilders have is that the global market is too competitive and the local market is too poor. So there is no volume. And no efficiency. And no profits. Paul has laid out the perspective of most well-traveled and comparatively wealthy observers. But in the real Philippine world where shipriders are comparatively poor, a second hand Japanese ferry is indeed convenient and affordable. Until Trump raises global oil prices and the ferry operators cannot afford to run the used ships, and routes are cancelled. And shipbuilders groan.
There is a real world, it is economic and the Philippines is not competitive, except a couple of pros who can manage because they have multiple dimensions in what they can produce. Here is Gemini’s summary of the two main Cebu shipbuilders:
Major Shipbuilders in Cebu
I appreciate all the well travelled here, the good meaning of one too many (opposite of tipping point)Quality beats quantity.
Most of us are of that sector, although Joey makes his way to the more grounded Filipinos where money is not easy. The Philippines runs on an economic ecosystem that is held up by needs, and yachts are not among them. I was thinking of getting a sailboat, what great fun to sail between islands, but there’s no place to park it, out of the typhoons, and no way to protect it from Filipino pirates (otherwise known as poor people doing raids). There is no well-to-do sailing community here. The Cebu Yacht Clob is six boats and a dock. Not quite Marina del Rey.
Indeed.
I an at a Maririme confetence as I typed this and I talked to a SG naval architect snd he is here to help the ph.He asled me to write abput his company. Maybe I will.
First, I will fullfil the wishes of the events planner to publish one about the event , I scheduled it for tomorrow.
I look forward to reading it.
Manythanks
Finding Scale. Seems the only thing with scale locally is the number of people who needs ayuda.
That’s right.
Don’t forget fish….hehe
I got this in your essay: “Do not simply buy X-Road.” A few months ago I explored Estonia’s X-Road and the Philippines’ attempt at adapting it to the local culture and environment. In the big picture it is called eGovDX, I believe….but then there are other “branches” like eGovPH, etc. I believe DICT is in charge. I used to monitor their progress every few months, but it must be six months now since I last checked. Progress has been slow….but I guess by Philippine standards it is still progress…..
We already tslked about our common peeve of pwede na and I ended up being peeved of the topic.
We also learned that if we rush things” Ang tumakbo ng matulin kung matinik malalim”.
‘We also learned that if we rush things” Ang tumakbo ng matulin kung matinik malalim”.’ – Karl
So true…which is why in the Philippines we always take our time.
But then we should not complain when our competitors get there ahead of us.
If we can do that in the road while drivimg then we are goood……or not.
Past mistakes can offer lessons that, when learned, guide future action. But at what point does mining the past for hints stop being a teaching exercise and become an excuse for inactionable criticism? Take the legacy of the 1986 People Power Revolution. Protests without concrete, actionable goals are a waste of energy, but EDSA was a profound democratic correction — one studied with immense admiration by non-Philippine scholars for decades afterward, with its lessons even now informing American civic organizing at this peak of the Trump era. Yet, I find it odd that many in the Philippine aspirant middle class and liberal elite so readily dismiss EDSA as a “failure” simply because their narrow, institutional expectations of the revolution did not align with the material trajectory of the broader Philippine population.
The Philippine middle class (both old and new) and liberal elite has their own dictator fixation and authoritarian nostalgia. They fail to understand that their insistence on moralizing and reformist language, when not backed by a willingness to redistribute their own socio-economic privilege, reaches the ears of the masa as empty and hypocritical. One can see this in the enduring, flawed belief that Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew was some sort of “good dictator” (when he was a continually and democratically elected prime minister). Instead of doing the hard, consistent work of navigating ground realities to reform the patronage system from within, they seek “saviors” to force through changes by sheer “political will.” Much has been written by Philippine political scientists how quickly Class ABC abandoned liberal reformism to adopt Dutertismo from 2015 onwards, hoping a strongman would simultaneously discipline the “corrupt elite” (except themselves, of course) and the unruly poor.
For Class D/E, their goals in 1986 and today remain the same: relief from debilitating poverty, salary-draining inflation, and rampant unemployment. Their goals are rooted in immediate, material needs. These are the exact same material vulnerabilities that drove most of Class D/E back into the arms of the post-EDSA patronage system and political dynasty ayuda networks. Shouldn’t the primary objective, then be to alleviate the conditions that keep Class D/E captured by patronage in the first place? Shouldn’t the goal be to build alternative pathways to economic independence, where the rational choice doesn’t default to depending on ayuda? The politics of the masa has always been the politics of survival.
The critical question for those with greater collective agency and political power is: what kind of Philippines do they seek to build? One of taller ivory towers for themselves to stand above rising waters while others drown, or one where a rising tide actually lifts all boats? In ancient times, building a bangka was a collective action requiring the effort of the entire barangay. If the privileged classes truly want to move the nation forward, they must step out of their ivory towers and share the labor of structural reform.
My life is guided by the saying: “The best time to start was yesterday. The second best time to start is now.” The best time to start building that bangka which carries the nation towards a better future was yesterday. The second best time is now.
You are mister Empathy. You actually wore both the shoes and you also wore the hat.
I saw contrasts: criticism of moralizing and moralizing; criticism of the middle class and a call for a larger middle class.
Ah, excellent.
Ok, Good to hear many views and many perspectives.
Filipinos often easily classify anything that isn’t almost perfect as a failure. It is akin to the mindset that a talented kid who doesn’t become high school valedictorian or at least salutatorian has failed in the eyes of some parents, or a sibling who does not live up to his honor student kuya or ate is a failure too.
I have seen examples of that among my high school batchmates, some of whom claimed to have marched on EDSA in 1986 and said that EDSA had failed them. The narrative of DDS that “30 years of yellow ruling the country from 1986-2016 has failed” (conveniently labeling Ramos, Erap and GMA as yellow)” was the distorted version of that.
Manuel Buencamino once commented here around 2015 that most Filipinos want to discipline everyone but themselves. That might be the difference from the kind of discipline that for instance the Japanese practice which emphasizes self-control first, at least ideally.
And Class C tries very hard to maintain their standard and not to slip back into Class D. Often the loss or lay-off of the breadwinner (often an OFW) in class C can be challenging.
It is interesting that in the Philippines, those of the oldest wealth are often those who are the furthest looking – think PNoy or Gina Lopez. Even among the elite, there are stories similar to those of Ibarra’s ancestor versus Elias’ ancestor, a story from the Noli that shows how lamangan has very deep roots in the Philippines, the zero-sum game mindset fostered for sure by those who ruled the country then, pitting everyone against everyone. There are some Fil-Ams with former sugar hacienda roots whose wealth went down in the 1970s/1980s, whose hatred for the Marcoses is personal because his crony Roberto Benedicto – and the decline of the sugar market in that period – cut into their old status. There are allegedly some people who hate Cory because CARP cut into their land investments. Novelist F. Sionil Jose had a hatred of Spanish mestizo elites that turned pathological as he grew older and even led him to sympathy for the DDS because allegedly some Spanish mestizo elites had grabbed his family’s land in Ilocos.
my father told me when I called him up during Ondoy, a bit worried that his place along Katipunan back then might be affected, that Ondoy only came into the headlines because for the first time the middle class who had houses in Marikina Valley – and Twitter – were affected by floods, the poor had been affected for a long time and nobody noticed.
The extension of that nowadays is that even Quezon City, which was the place a lot of the middle class moved to after WW2 as it had at most ankle-deep floods (my own experience going to school in boots in the late 1970s and early 1980s) is now affected by floods as well, or that call center agents might find the car they worked for washed away. Yet of course I have satirically predicted a Philippine dystopia 2100 where Skyway levels 1-3 are flooded and full of garbage while the upper levels are clean and have flying cars.
(in some versions of that dystopia in my drafts, there are TSOH literalists similar to Pinoy bible literalists today who have turned fragments of this blog into “Scripture”)
MLQ3 often likes to write that “today began yesterday” which is a bit too deterministic and predestined.
I have relented publishing my dystopic short stories about the future Philippines and write about flood control instead (where most are in the same boat by now) because I joked about them to Xiao (scenarios where SM North in 2100 is “SM North harbor” etc) and he told me “do you really think we are THAT hopeless”..
another pattern of the Philippines is that often parts of the elite that felt they had not gotten enough of their share just wanted their turn, sometimes mobilizing the poor for it:
– a lot of the rich Filipinos who had first dibs at friar lands when they were put out for sale during the American period were former “inquilinos” similar to the Rizals
– Marcos Sr. went against “oligarchs” and especially then predominantly still Spanish mestizo elite that according to MLQ3 had snubbed him – to enrich cronies and the like
– Duterte mobilized the resentments of the DEs and Visayans to give the ABS frequencies to SMNI and the third telco to Dennis Uy, among other things
it is also interesting to see how Marcos Sr. and Duterte defined “elitists” in their day. Joey is right about elites systemically (I do not think he is condemning them as people) but due to how the word elitists was redefined in the past, it can be misunderstood. “Elitista” for DDS were only “dilawan” in 2016, and are “Marcos+dilawan” today – not Dutertes..
Dennis Uy is continuing to do a slow motion tanking. Land bank just foreclosed on one of his hotel properties.
Phoenix Petroleum tanked, I think.
Supercat must be rescued.
Apologies for the late reply; I’ve been a bit busy over the weekend.
When the political power is a prize rather than a tool (Booty Capitalism, Paul Hutchcroft), anything that is not total victory can be a failure, and every excluded faction’s grievance becomes a claim on a future election. And yes, my criticism is systemic, not personal. In other words a social class is a position within a set of incentives, and pushing to change the incentives is more useful than sermonizing at the people in them. That includes lower Class C precariat, who are one job loss or one missed remittance away from falling back to Class D. The time horizon of political patience often follows economic security: old wealth has the room to think in decades, while aspirants think in sweldo day. A larger, more secure middle class should be the primary goal to cultivate durable political change; my problem is mainly with how the middle class and liberal elite often spends their political weight.
Perhaps the “valedictorian standard” is what makes “EDSA failed” morally costless to say. The aspirant middle class graded what came after EDSA like a report card, then outsourced the homework to a “saint” (Cory) who didn’t ask to be a saint, and DDS recycled that disappointment as reactionary populism against “30 years of yellow.”
One observation I made in the Philippines is the love of keeping score which can sometimes become convenient footholds for radicals and reactionaries to exploit. Grudges and grievances have decades-long memories, as is the persistance of in-group narrative. Part of this behavior is probably the recognizance and necessity of theater which Philippine liberals, who first absorbed undigested superficial aspects of Spanish then American mores, tend to shy from. Mores by the way, that are the basis of moralizing and are not shared by the broader population. So perhaps the pro-progress, liberal Philippine side needs to start “keeping score” with ledgers of achievements as well. That is to say, progress is an unfinished job of continual renewal, not a singular, failed revolution — and unfinished jobs get finished with concrete, knowable, and probably most importantly, seen increments.
The friar-lands, Marcos Sr., and Duterte examples are actually different expressions of the same behavior if one thinks about it — creating the semblance of popular support then steering most of the benefits towards the in-group that had just gained power. The Friar Lands Act gave current occupants first claim on paper, but the later amendments lifted the cap on sales to individuals, allowing consolidation of proto-dynasty power. Marcos sold martial law as a war on oligarchs to enthusiastic supporters and then handed state and foreign corporations to cronies; Duterte would do the same decades later when he handed out favors to a new class of cronies.
Of course the elitista label only means whoever is outside the in-group’s circle, so labels fix nothing. Rules that bind everyone do, but that would require the side in power to start with themselves — the slow-walking of CARP and the Anti-Dynasty Bill are major examples of why there is no unilateral political disarmament.
Another way to look at things from a cultural habit having possible positive and negative aspects is that lamangan and demanding everyone to be disciplined but themselves do ont need to be the default expression of national character. In other words, it is a result of rational behavior when outcomes depend on who you know. Perhaps if the payoff is changed and the same envy mechanism competes on delivery and competence instead, the same habits may be pushed towards the positive.
Lamangan can only work if it is done in a highly performative way, because the visibility is what makes lamangan “effective.” In my current cultural operating system analysis exercise I have defined things such as the Seal of Good Local Governance (493 out of 1,725 LGUs were passed the SGLG requirements in 2023) and Mayors for Good Governance (157 mayors within two months of launch, growing to 193 members by October 2025 with 110 observers whose applications are undergoing vetting) can be seen as lamangan but with a visible a scoreboard.
EDSA was noted by scholars to be a case of “spontaneous collective will” that unified social classes and bridged all together. Perhaps the major disunifying cleavage was the point where the aspirant middle class’s interests were secured, giving room for its morals to take over, while the masa‘s interests remained unsatisfied. In a way, moral politics that do not bridge cross-class interests end up not being very effective.
Leni Robredo, when forming Angat Buhay after her 2022 loss, may have actually been building a prototype of that bridge that unifies: poor communities pitch their needs and private funding partners (NGO, business, foreign aid) are matched to them by Angat Buhay, and the foundation’s volunteers act as the implementers within local communities. I think one of the reasons why Angat Buhay is successful is what in our field we refer to as scoping: keep the goals focused while making the outputs visible. The main issue IMHO, is even now Angat Buhay’s resources are small in comparison to even the NTA LGUs receive automatically and often misuse, but a limitation can also cause increased focusing on where action matters most… One needs to think beyond Angat Buhay as a model for charity and instead think of Angat Buhay as a matchmaking model which bridges common interests that brings the Filipino together into a bigger group, not split them into smaller in-groups. I hope the model gets copied and expanded with more funding…
I think there are also hints of another new model of elite performance-based competition taking shape in M4GG that is moving away from patronage politics’ theater of performance-based competition, and like Angat Buhay again it is taking shape at the local level. It might seem useless or surprising to the traditional Philippine liberal thinking that like the patronage system prefers top-down change but I can see many parallels to the way leadership worked in Scott’s and Junker’s reconstructions of pre-Hispanic society. One must admit that one of the main reasons why the patronage system is so strong among Class D/E, and therefore the Philiippines because those two classes constitute 90-93% of the population, is that political dynasties are constantly updating the outer “wrapper” or facade that goes over the actual cultural operating system below, while Philippine liberals are continue to try to “install” something that is incompatible due to lack of adaptation on top of the same cultural operating system (not to mention the cultural hardware).
One may need to start thinking about things differently. For example, the lower Class C (the larger portion) are in a sense a precariat a few missed sweldo or reduced remittance away from falling back down into Class D, while Class D/E’s ayuda dependence due to insufficient livable income are both demand-side problems. An Angat Buhay-like approach is inclusive of those helped in order to transition dependency to more independence; being able to earn a wage starts to end dependence. A welder’s pay is the real anti-ayuda program, which is why Karl’s shipyard matters, provided the skills pipeline is built. I don’t agree with top-down views since only strengthening the bottom can create a stronger top that can perpetuate gains. So something to consider is how Angat Buhay esssentially “adopts” one barangay at a time and how M4GG expands a few cities and reassesses before expanding again. One must break down and work on a major problem a piece at a time before issuing a verdict, rather than demanding instant results.
None of this is pwede na — pwede na isn’t just “good enough,” but where one stops trying. Instead, a version one of “good” can be with a kept ledger of achievement and a date for the second iteration. In pre-Hispanic Philippine society (just like other Austronesian societies) the whole community took part in building ocean-going canoes (e.g. bangka). While care was taken to build the canoe well, such canoes were never expected to be perfect when launched. Rather Austronesian ocean-going canoes were first launched, then rigorously tested and refined before setting out on the cross-ocean Austronesian expansion. Nobody waited for a perfect hull before launching a bangka, something that may offer lessons for the Philippines today.
“Leni Robredo, when forming Angat Buhay after her 2022 loss, …” – Joey N.
I believe then Vice President Leni Robredo formed Angat Buhay in 2016.
I think she could not have founded a ngo non profit while VP
Angat Buhay Foundation, incorporated as Angat Pinas, Inc.,[1] is a non-profit, non-governmental organization based in the Philippines.[2] It was founded and officially launched on July 1, 2022, a day after its founder Leni Robredo’s term as Vice President of the Philippines expired.[3][4][5]
CV is sort of correct. The OVP’s main program during FVP Leni Robredo’s tenure was the anti-poverty initiative launched in October 2016 called “Angat Buhay.” Angat Buhay Foundation, the NGO, was launched in July 2022 to carry on the anti-poverty work and is what is commonly referred to as “Angat Buhay” now, but the former OVP program and the current NGO are different entities and should be referred to as such.
Ok. Copy.
I will not forget a high school batchmate who said “we have to put those who say they are good to a higher standard” – meaning PNoy.
Even VP Leni suffered from the saint cliche, even if she is totally different from Cory, as below article where I reacted point by point to a very fallacious Rappler article shows:
well, just have a look at Rappler’s summaries of PNoy’s SONAs where they write “PNoy boasted about” X when all he did was mention achievement X.
So expectations of sainthood can be like a millstone, as the well-behaved are judged by different standards than those from “Section E” (see some present PH Senators)
For sure, M4GG and Angat Buhay can provide the incentives to transform the culture into one that respects those who build stuff rather than for instance Robin Padilla.
I have a feeling we’ve heard some variation of this even on these blog comments over the years, and even now. I don’t have an issue with people who are civically lazy, but what really grinds my gears are people who are civically lazy AND morally lazy. These are the people who have the greater degree of agency to effectuate change yet choose to spout cynicism which depresses others’ confidence in finding their collective agency. Invariably thinking like this leads to accepting authoritarianism and what I mock as “personal dictator shopping.”
IMHO liberalism is generally bad at touting accomplishments since it is frowned upon as socially unacceptable and uncouth. The center-right of liberalism is better at this than the center-left of liberalism which is dominated by academic-speak (especially nowadays). But if citizens don’t know what the accomplishments done in the name of the people are, the populist fringe will fill in the space. Accomplishments still need to be seen in order to register. We are seeing many examples of that in the US and Western Europe nowadays. It was a problem for PNoy as well, whose accomplishments while incomplete and still in progress were many. Duterte essentially rode PNoy’s good policies until his Covid mismanagement brought about economic calamity.
Going off of my theory on how cultural habits can pull in either direction, positive or negative, one can see what M4GG and Angat Buhay are doing as the inverse of what malcontents like Robin Padilla are doing. Personally I think the century of institutionalized nationalist propaganda in education of the elite notion of “Filipino greatness” derived from Ilustrado then Katipunero envy of foreigners was a bad thing. It did immense damage to the Philippines by creating a goal that could not be easily reached without providing any roadmap on how to get to the goal aside from “we will be greater… someday…” One must go back to the roots and respect the underlying culture in order to build foundations. The empirical work of American and Western historians and sociologists that do not contain nationalist bias is a starting point. I also think Virgilio Enriquez’s Sikolohiyang Pilipino, while still containing a nationalist bias in its aim to completely excise “Western influence,” gets a lot right in beginning to understand why the Filipino acts the way he acts through the lens of culture, language, and the lived Filipino experience. IMHO both M4GG and Angat Buhay are reflecting that.