Grandma’s ghost

THERE has been much rejoicing among some at the announcement this week by San Miguel Corp. chief Ramon S. Ang that the company will no longer pursue the controversial Pasig River Expressway (Parex) project. Ang cited public resistance to the project as the reason for pulling the plug.

I suspect there was more to it than that, but “bowing to public pressure” is a simple and diplomatic explanation and an entirely plausible one; there was indeed a great deal of protest against the planned six-lane, elevated tollway that would have traversed virtually the entire length of the Pasig River.

A more fulsome explanation that included some of the obvious factors working against the Parex project wouldn’t have the same ring to it and certainly wouldn’t change the final result, so there is no real point in bringing it up. For example, President Marcos Jr.’s executive order in July 2023 directing that the Pasig River be preserved and sustainably developed, a signal that rednecks who would bend the rules to uncritically approve anything were no longer in charge of the country, or the certainty that the detailed engineering design and especially the right-of-way acquisitions needed would be costly and time-consuming nightmares. The latter factors raised the specter of the city being scarred at some point for some indeterminate period of time by a partially completed and unusable highway — something that neither affected communities nor a developer would want. Ask the people in Boston how that sort of thing works out.

Even though I am personally happy to see the Parex idea permanently shelved — and looking forward to the planned development of the Pasig River Esplanade, which will pass a few blocks from where I live — its formal cancellation is still troubling in a couple of respects.

First, despite its manifold flaws, the Parex proposal did address a serious question of mobility in this city, that being the lack of good west-to-east, crosstown routes. Pinched between Manila Bay and Laguna de Bay, the major road routes in Metro Manila are almost all oriented north to south. A new road would increase traffic due to induced demand, but substantial improvements to existing roads such as the España-Quezon Avenue, Magsaysay Aurora Boulevard, Ortigas Avenue, Shaw Boulevard, Tejeron-J.P. Rizal Avenue axes, and others, perhaps would not, or at least, not to the same undesirable degree. And, of course, there needs to be much more done in terms of public transportation development; to be fair, it is not entirely being overlooked, but there is still a great deal of room and justification for growth, and it will be for the foreseeable future. Scrubbing the Parex project will really only be a worthwhile decision if these other issues are substantially addressed.

Second, some groups have taken the occasion of Ang’s announcement that the Parex has been canceled to inveigh against San Miguel generally for things that are entirely unrelated to that project, mainly energy developments of various kinds being undertaken by San Miguel Global Power, the development of the new airport in Bulacan, and the awarding of the P170-billion rehabilitation and operation contract for the Ninoy Aquino International Airport to a San Miguel-led consortium.

Those reactions remind me of a weird lesson in classism I learned when I was young. I was born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and much of my extended family hails from the surrounding area. Latrobe is most famous for being the hometown of golfing legend Arnold Palmer, whose fantastic wealth and influence permitted him to pursue projects as he saw fit.

Palmer’s fingerprints were (and still are) all over Latrobe and its immediate surroundings; schools and hospitals built purely out of altruism, and a great deal that was not, but nevertheless benefited the community with improved infrastructure, more commercial activity and more jobs. My favorite example is the Latrobe Airport, which is out of all proportion to the relatively small town (population of about 8,000); Palmer’s investment turned what was an appropriately sized airfield for a handful of small general aviation planes into one capable of handling large commercial jetliners, all because Palmer needed a place for his private jet.

Any news about Arnold Palmer’s charitable or commercial endeavors around his hometown always brought a reaction of sneering contempt from my grandmother; my Dad’s mother, my other grandmother, thought Palmer was a great guy. When I worked up the courage to ask Grandma why she hated Arnold Palmer, she had a simple answer: “Because he’s rich.”

That is just the same sort of stupid, simplistic and over-generalized attitude I see in much of the criticism leveled at San Miguel, particularly in the examples above, where there is hardly any effort to hide the simple assumption that anything San Miguel does is automatically evil and exploitative.

That attitude helps no one, not communities that “activists” feel they are standing up for, not the broader aspirations for fair, effective, and consistent policy and regulation, and certainly not the credibility of activism. It is lazy and oversimplifies things, often to the point of unintended consequences. San Miguel, being the biggest conglomerate in the Philippines, has the capability to have an enormous impact on the course of the nation and everyone’s daily lives, a capability which it energetically exercises, and so it ought to be subject to scrutiny, and expect that it will be. That scrutiny must not be prejudiced, however. If it is, the resulting criticism lacks all credibility, and any other well-intentioned and reasoned criticism that is actually necessary is likewise dismissed.