THE elephant in the room in the national conversation why we are so wretched as a nation is the huge, even dominant role of our ruling class in creating a woeful society. After all, Juan de la Cruz, even journalists like me, have had little power in shaping our nation. The Philippine elite does.
Among dysfunctional ruling classes, the Philippine elite stands alone. Not for its corruption — that is banal across the Global South — nor for its ostentatious wealth, which pales beside Latin America’s or Russia’s oligarchs. What makes our elite unique is something deeper and more corrosive: a disbelief in the Philippines itself. This is not mere cynicism or self-interest; it is a detachment, a ruling caste that treats the country as a private extraction site rather than a shared project.
They do not care if the nation progresses, regresses, or simply limps along, for as long as their gated enclaves are secure and their passports to Vancouver, Los Angeles or Singapore remain valid.
That indifference is not some accidental moral failing. It is the elite’s defining ideology, forged over a century of colonial mimicry and perpetuated through the post-EDSA “democratic” façade, and importantly, the dominance of capitalist ideology, which after all is built on the belief in the primacy of the individual over the community. Our ruling class learned early that the safest strategy was not to build a nation, but to ride over it.
SM Retail president Jonathan Ng expressed this no-care attitude a few months ago when he referred to exposés of massive corruption through ghost flood control projects as mere “political noise.” An executive of Ayala Land much earlier said their posh villages don’t need the nation.
A case in point: the Sys SM Group has several malls in China. So do the Gokongweis, who have even acquired land-use rights for an 8.5-hectare property in Chengdu. The Ayalas have an electronics manufacturing joint venture in China and just last year junked its 30-year partnership with the Japanese-based Honda and bet its future in the automobile industry on China’s BYD, now the world’s biggest electric car manufacturer. The Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry is by far the biggest business association in the country, whose chairman emeritus is Lucio Tan, the taipan with the biggest investments in China.
Anyone who knows China and has objectively studied our disputes with it in the South China Sea will not have an iota of doubt that the administration’s belligerent stance against China is due to US manipulation and propaganda through its minions, undertaken to draw a wedge between the superpower and the Philippines.
But have these Chinese-Filipino elites close to China tried to explain this reality to the president, or even protested the fact that the Defense department practically sees the superpower as the biggest threat to the country? That we cannot risk alienating our biggest trading partner? I don’t think so.
Karl Marx had the brilliant insight that the state in capitalist societies is merely the executive committee of the ruling class. We seem to be an exception: The state here consists of a largely autonomous political class (mainly emerging from the gobernadorcillos and landlords in the rural areas) who are servile to the United States and to a small faction of pro-US tycoons. The ruling class intervenes only when it needs a particular government action or regulation for its benefit. Tycoons suck up to each president, the only difference is the degree of their suction power.
Our elite’s nature is the product of history. Unlike India’s bureaucratic elite, whose British-trained lawyers at least mouthed Gandhian nationalism, or Brazil’s agrarian barons who eventually saw that their fortunes depended on national industrialization, the Philippine elite were bred as compradors — middlemen for foreign capital, not stewards of a future republic. The ilustrados of the 1890s, lionized in our textbooks, were reformist petitioners more than revolutionaries. José Rizal begged Madrid for rights instead of organizing mass insurrection, while the wealthiest families begged the colonizer to appoint them as gobernadorcillos, who functioned as mayor, municipal judge and local administrator. No Ombudsman during that time so they helped themselves to acquire vast tracts of lands, in many cases pushing out their age-old tillers who didn’t have documents to prove their ownership.
Pattern
The pattern hardened under American rule. From friar lands to sugar haciendas to utility monopolies, the big families learned that their prosperity depended on pleasing-based proconsuls and Washington, not serving the Filipino masses. By the time “independence” arrived in 1946, families in the Philippines had already internalized a simple, deadly tenet: the Philippines is not a motherland to build, but a franchise to milk, a market to exploit, a territory to draw cheap labor from.
The disbelief in nationhood shows most clearly in raw economics. The top 1 percent controls about a quarter of total wealth, yet the same tycoons use every legal and illegal trick to park assets offshore. This is not capitalism in its classic, nation-building sense — where industrialists reinvest in factories, technology and workers. It is rentier capitalism: flip land, hoard property, jack up telecom and power rates, and wire the proceeds abroad. Rather than mobilizing his capital in this country to build productive enterprises, a Chinese-Filipino taipan bought vast vineyards in Spain and France, including their wine and cognac products.
Indifference to human capital is even more damning. The country exports its workers with some 2.2 million overseas Filipino workers remitting tens of billions of dollars annually, propping up our foreign reserves, and funding the very malls and property empires that underpay their service crews. The Philippine economy has become a machine that converts provincial poverty into global remittances, then recycles those remittances into consumption controlled by the same handful of families.
Lifestyle and culture complete the picture of an elite detached from the nation. The spectacle of designer bags, watches and even a million-dollar wedding ring for a senator’s wife, are boasted about in Facebook posts, while inflation devours the budgets of jeepney drivers and fisherfolk — illustrates the psychic split. Our elite send their children to Wharton, Stanford, Oxford, or some Swiss boarding school, groomed to join global networks of capital and culture that have nothing to do with Philippine realities. In Makati and BGC, the elite perform a globalized identity: English as primary language, children who have never ridden a jeepney, cooks and drivers as their only contact with the poor.
Ruling
The ruling families point to their corporate social responsibility programs, foundations and scholarship schemes. The Ayala Foundation plants trees; SM donates relief goods after every major flood. Every oligarch has his scholars, and he even publishes their names with their photographs. But these gestures are tiny compared to the tax breaks, regulatory capture and sweetheart deals that sustain their dominance. They give away millions while securing billions. It is not nation-building; it is reputation management, with the tax-break benefits.
“SM Cares”? The mall conglomerate “pioneered” or normalized the practice of hiring workers on short term contracts (five month stints) to avoid regularization and security of tenure, making the term “endo” (end of contract) a feared one among SM employees. After getting so much flak for its endo system, SM has required its suppliers to employ their own sales girls for its products. The “good guys” indeed.
The tragedy is that macroeconomic statistics can obscure this structural rot. International institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank praise the Philippines for posting 6-percent annual growth; credit-rating agencies reward our technocrats for fiscal discipline. But behind the spreadsheets, our Human Development Index languishes in the lower tiers, our education system sinks in global rankings and our manufacturing base remains stunted. The growth is real, but its owners are few.
What, then, is to be done? The usual reformist prescriptions — anti-dynasty laws, campaign finance regulation, party reform — are necessary but insufficient. A ruling class that does not believe in the country will always find ways around formal rules. The real task is political: to build a counter-elite and a citizen movement that binds its own future to the fate of the archipelago, not to some condo in New York or second passport in Lisbon. That means nurturing leaders whose wealth, families and ambitions are rooted here, and whose careers rise or fall with the quality of public schools, hospitals, mass transport and courts.
This may sound naïve in a country where even barangay captains behave like minor monarchs. Yet every nation that escaped oligarchic stagnation did so when segments of its elite decided they had more to gain from building a robust republic than from looting a fragile one. South Korea’s chaebols, for all their sins, bet on industrialization under a developmental state; China’s “princelings” tied their fortunes to growth and infrastructure at home; even Indonesia, long seen as an oligarchy, has slowly produced technocrats and entrepreneurs who care about national competitiveness.
Our ruling class does not hate the country. The truth is more chilling: they simply do not see it. They see parcels of land, quarterly earnings, captive regulators, social media managers and embassy officers processing their visas. They do not see a people whose dignity and future are intertwined with their own. Until they are forced — by political struggle, violent revolution, or drastic institutional reform to believe that their survival depends on the survival of the Philippine nation, this archipelago will remain what it has long been to them: just a lucrative, replaceable market.
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
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Website: www.rigobertotiglao.com
