Senator Manuel Roxas II candidly shares his views on marriage, his engagement with broadcaster Korina Sanchez, plans for the presidency and the mistakes of the current administration in an interview with Philippine Daily Inquirer editors and reporters. Video taken by INQUIRER.net production specialists Edzelle Pena and Rastle Lozano.
MANILA, Philippines—Nothing can stop Sen. Manuel Roxas II from running for President in 2010.
“What other meaning can my life have other than that?” Roxas said at a dinner on Tuesday with Philippine Daily Inquirer editors and reporters during which he declared that he would not be deflected from his goal.
“I am ready to serve. I am prepared to make it happen. I think I’m the best qualified, competence-wise, value-wise. And I owe it to my country to try what I can and fix it,” said the 51-year-old senator.
Roxas, a grandson and namesake of the late President Manuel Roxas, said it would be a great disservice to the Filipino people if he would not offer himself as a presidential candidate.
He said people should be given a chance to choose him.
“What higher calling can there be than try to fix your country?”
Roxas is not disheartened by his relatively low ranking in the surveys now—he placed fifth in a presidential preferences survey conducted by the Social Weather Stations last February.
“May 2010,” he said when asked at what point he would throw in the towel and transfer his support to a more “winnable” candidate and trust that the latter would fix the country.
Element of trust
Roxas, the Liberal Party president, said the single most important element in choosing a President is trust.
“One way of analyzing the ills of the country is [that] there’s no trust—it’s every man for himself. People in fact trust the reverse. They don’t trust that if they fall in line and follow the rules and do what’s right, then they will get ahead,” he said. “[The thinking is] for me to get ahead, I must make suhol (give bribes), I must make singit [jump the queue] and I must find a different way. That has become the most corrosive, dangerous development—the acceptance that that’s a fact of life here. If you have that, you really have a broken society,” he said.
He said a system abetting corruption and “subterfuges,” and where “having connections is the norm” was not a democracy.
Elite back-scratching each other
“You just have the elite back-scratching each other and protecting each other’s interest. The elite screwed us up over the last four generations,” he said.
He acknowledged that he might be part of the elite in terms of socio-economic status.
“But my record, my father’s record and grandfather’s record speak for themselves. It’s not like at anytime they stole or took advantage of their position, or in any way used their position to enlarge their economic interests,” he said.
The moneyed Araneta-Roxas clan owns the Araneta Center, the vast commercial center in Cubao, Quezon City, and are landowners in Capiz province. Roxas City, the capital of Capiz, was named after the clan’s patriarch, the first President of the post-war Philippine Republic.
“Why is it that Cubao is only doing call centers today when I was the guy who started it? [As trade and industry secretary], I was the one who awarded eco-zone status [to investors], which meant incentives and no taxes,” said Roxas.
No to conflict of interest
When he headed the Department of Trade and Industry in 2000, Roxas also chaired the Philippine Economic Zone Authority, a government agency that promoted the establishment of economic zones for foreign investments. Roxas developed, conceptualized and wrote the PEZA rules for the grant of incentives for information technology locators and businesses.
While he was in the executive department, Cubao was never allowed to apply for eco-zone status with PEZA. Roxas would not allow it so as not to be accused of conflict of interest.
When he saw that office spaces in Metro Manila were virtually empty as a result of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the then trade secretary harnessed the potential of the country as a global information technology hub.
Make IT Philippines
He launched “Make IT Philippines” and succeeded in convincing ousted President Joseph Estrada to make IT the focus of his first visit to the United States. This led to the biggest global industry names to invest in the country, creating 400,000 jobs for call center agents and Filipino IT workers.
Last year, Roxas helped the private sector raise $3 million to fund a study by the McKinsey & Co. international strategic consultants to take the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry to the next level.
“The industry needed a new strategic plan that was credible ... to pay for a professional business development team that will continue to keep the Philippines present in the international arena,” he said.
Roxas finished economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1979. Before returning to the Philippines, he worked as an investment banker for a number of years in the United States.
He began his public service stint in the House of Representatives in 1993. He was appointed trade and industry secretary by ousted President Joseph Estrada and, after Estrada’s fall from power in 2001, was reappointed by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
In 2004, he won a Senate seat with a staggering 19.5 million votes, the largest obtained by a candidate in any Philippine election.
Advice from a Cuban
Roxas remembers how he came to decide to return home.
In 1985, he was watching Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” on ABC News when the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos announced the holding of snap elections.
He remembers a Cuban friend, Roberto Gozueta, the then chair of the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Corp., asking him: “What are you doing here? Marcos has declared elections.”
When Roxas said that he was thinking about it and that it was a risk, the Cuban told him: “I am Cuban. I have no country to go back to. You have a chance to do something for your country.”
Sense of duty
Roxas said that he has been very lucky in his life and for that reason feels a corresponding sense of duty.
He said that if there is one lesson that he learned from his late father, Sen. Gerardo Roxas, it was a “deep sense of duty and responsibility to give back.”
He recalled his father’s metaphor for public service: “You were born with a ladder. So after you climb your ladder, don’t pull it up. You have to leave it there to allow others to come up.”
Copyright 2009 Philippine Daily Inquirer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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