Ignored in the debate over Pax Silica is that it is the latest scheme hoping to find purpose and value for competing plans that have repeatedly failed to take off: turning the former Clark Air Base into something economically viable for the country. The competing plans have been either to turn the former base into a thriving industrial or commercial facility or into the next capital of the Philippines.
Stephen CuUnjieng once patiently tried to explain to me how Singapore used the former British naval base as the source for what grew into its sovereign wealth fund (a fascinating lesson in combining national vision with sustained execution), but needless to say, native racketeering has always defeated the possibility of something similar happening on our end.
Two administrations, those of former Presidents Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and Benigno Aquino III, converged on this attempt: Arroyo’s by developing plans or infrastructure necessary to turn the special economic zone and freeport in Clark into a viable prospect, and Aquino’s by introducing the concept of a new metropolis that would serve as the de facto administrative capital of the country. Former President Rodrigo Duterte typically took a myopic view of things, appointing Arroyo to preside over Clark programs and projects as a presidential adviser, while muddling things by instituting the Bonifacio Capital District as a magnet for attracting government institutions such as the Supreme Court and the Senate, while members of his Cabinet pushed forward with moving national government agencies to Clark.
Duterte’s confusion is nothing new. In 1975, Ferdinand Marcos Sr., who borrowed so many things from the era of the Japanese occupation, decreed the creation of Metro Manila, itself the revival of a wartime measure, the creation of the City of Greater Manila to expand the area covered by a declaration of an Open City on the eve of the Japanese occupation. Paulo Alcazaren, in 2014, painstakingly traced the ebb and flow of this idea from the time it was first proposed before the Commonwealth, to its becoming a temporary wartime measure, to its potential revival had Ramon Magsaysay lived to serve a second term, to Marcos creating Metropolitan Manila in 1975, to his transforming it into an administrative region and later the National Capital Region from 1976 to 1978.
Along the way he abolished Quezon City as the national capital in 1976 (the new cult of personality would not tolerate reminders of the past otherwise), but made the restoration of Manila’s capital status meaningless by his creation of a Metro Manila Commission: famously oppositionist always, the restored ‘capital’ would be forever denied actual influence, and no other local government would enjoy concentrated power either (the realities of dictatorship would not tolerate things otherwise). Thirteen years of dictatorship did not fail to create a new capital; it insisted on never even bothering, dangling pocket developments instead.
The creation of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority resulted in the worst of all possible outcomes for the public: spreading things out prevents institutions from acting coherently and this weakness increases executive power. It weakens the public’s power too, because citizens are reduced to pilgrims humbly trekking from one distant office to another seeking crumbs of service. Aside from presidents heading a national government that preferred administrative chaos to the alternative of imposing political will on urban sprawl, the only ones who gain from having a noncapital are local government barons whose fiefdoms were confirmed.
Nor would administrations dare to raise the specter of a proper national capital even as its neighbors undertook, in the 1990s and 2000s, what the Philippines had pioneered in 1939: the move to new, noncolonial capitals (Malaysia, Indonesia, even Myanmar). Whether in New Clark City or the Bonifacio Capital District, it’s all been attempted practically stealthily, burying the implications of what’s being attempted in a mind-numbing blanket of governmental jargon. Ballooning costs mean the capital district schemes are in perpetual danger of resulting not in new institutional homes but in cases of plunder against officials involved in their approval and execution; likewise for New Clark City, and every effort to move the bureaucracy there has ended up reversed as unpopular with government workers and unattractive to results-oriented Cabinet members.
And so, Pax Silica: the latest hope-against-hope to turn what has, so far, proven unviable into something finally viable. A shrewd and sharp observer of the follies of all our administrations once said to me that the common affliction of publicity-hungry presidencies is the penchant of Philippine administrations, including the present one, to announce nonbinding deals and nonformalized MOUs for propaganda purposes when they are meaningless.
We know too little of what is planned-if anything concrete is planned-when it comes to the Pax Silica scheme, except in the boldest of bold strokes, to have a productive conversation on the subject. What we need, first of all, is to understand why this particular (large) chunk of government real estate is being proposed: the blunt reality is that the government is the worst possible partner for anyone who is not out to make a quick buck through speculation within a maximum six-year window through influence-peddling, because our republic has no long-term vision or capacity.