Problems of the nation
RECITING the problems of the nation will not solve them but it will put them before those who can do something about them. We are lucky or fortunate in that we have reduced our problems of insurgency. Our main problem now is poverty. And this will have to be addressed from various angles. But it is the main obstacle to our having a nation of happy contented citizens.
Besides poverty, we have the problem of our educational system which is not fully geared to making a decent living. We are fortunate that we have a good health system, although it might need improvements. We need command of a language and in our case it has to be English. It could have been Spanish but the lingua franca of the world today is English. Singapore has Singaporean staccato English but it is English which can be used for progress and development. We have a Filipino English which is good but only the products of Metropolitan Manila and some cities like Baguio, Davao, and
some other cities have good command of the language. There is no reason for this. We spend 12 years learning this language and we should be proficient in it just as our native dialects. We need to be proficient enough so that we can use it to read the wisdom of the ages. We have a big advantage but we must not stop there. The graduates of our provincial schools still cannot use this tool to self-educate themselves.
Besides poverty and education we need employment without having to go abroad. We have been tremendously helped by the OFWs but working abroad has drawbacks like the break-up of the family. This is unnecessary. We can employ all of our people with a little bit of ingenuity. We can be like Germany or Japan or other industrialized countries. We just have to find out how we can help promote progress. Unemployment is an unnecessary canker in our economy. We have all sorts of natural resources. It just need a little bit more imagination and coordination to maximize the use of our natural and human resources. Unemployment and under-employment is rampant. But these can be cured with a little effort.
President Duterte is right in his fight against drugs and corruption. He has been successful in a way but we must not let him alone. All of us have an obligation to fight drugs and corruption. This is not the fight of one man. We all have to help. And this can be done with our common effort.
Then there is the problem of bias against mining. The problem here is the time frame. We do not see that mining has a long time frame, mostly about a hundred years for open-pit mining. When you plant rice you will use that square piece of land for four months. You cannot use it for something else. When you plant a mango tree, you cannot use that land for five or ten years before it bears fruit. The land is dedicated to that mango. When you do open-pit mining, that land is dedicated to mining for a hundred years but after that you can restore the land for agriculture. Open-pit is the safest of all kinds of mining. All the mining possible in the country together will not be one tenth of one percent of the land area of the Philippines. We must allow the use of that small piece of land until we extract the minerals that we need for our progress. It is a question of time frame. Mining is a natural resource that we have to use. We are already too late for manufacturing and for export of manufactured goods. There is already China and other ASEAN countries. What they do not have is our natural resource of mining. Mindanao for example has three faults that run from north to south which brought up our treasures of gold, nickel, and copper. We have potentially the biggest copper and gold mines in the world and we are not using it to feed our people. The bias against mining is a question of time frame. We have to sacrifice less than one tenth of one percent of our land area for a period of about 100 years. Is that not reasonable? We need to use the natural resources that the Lord has given us. We need to exploit our mines to progress as a nation.
Our problems then are poverty, education, drugs and corruption, and our bias against mining. We also have unemployment and under-employment and we can use our human resources if we only maximize the natural resources that God has given us abundantly. Now is a time of election of our leaders. They must make sure to use our natural and human resources to give basic comfortable lives to our citizens.