Reintroducing Jimmy Ongpin
IT is said that the rich find it hard to serve others. In 1997, my uncle Jojo gave me a VHS tape from a neighbor, which was titled “A Dangerous Life.” It was a 1988 Australianproduced television film about the last years of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. Of course, even if I was only in high school back then, I was already very familiar with the major characters.
But one character, one of President Cory Aquino’s political advisers, was played by Noel Trinidad, a famous actor comedian. He was Jaime Ongpin. As a young kid born in the 1980s, that was my only introduction to him, and definitely not so many young-ins are familiar with him now.
It is good that we are left with books such as “The Public Conscience of Jaime V. Ongpin and Jaime Ongpin,” “The Enigma: A Profile of the Filipino as Manager” by no less than National Artist Nick Joaquin himself. In them we have at least a glimpse of a man born in 1938 and counted the Tsinoy patriot Roman Ongpin as his grandfather. He finished a BS Business Administration major in Management at the Ateneo. His brother, Roberto or Bobby (who eventually became the elder Marcos’ trade minister), convinced him to take his MBA at the Harvard Business School.
In the United States, he met Maria Isabel Garcia, an American Literature student at a college in Massachusetts. They married, and their union produced three sons and two daughters, including Rafael, who is known to us as the dashing broadcaster Apa Ongpin. Maribel Ongpin eventually founded the The Philippine Textile Council, or Habi, a trustee of the National Museum of the Philippines and a columnist for this newspaper.
Early in Jimmy’s career, he entered Benguet Corp., the oldest mining company in the Philippines. He rose to become president and CEO of Benguet, and under his watch, the assets of the company grew from P73.5 million in 1962 to P3.9 billion in 1985, its revenues from P46.1 million to P3.3 billion, and its manpower increased from 7,000 to 18,413. Ongpin reported, “Benguet became one of the most profitable and most highly diversified groups in the Philippines.” The Management Association of the Philippines hailed him Management Man of the Year in 1982.
He said going to Harvard Business School was his best investment and the second-best decision he ever made; “Marrying Maribel was the bestest.” Despite his busy schedule, he doted on his very young family.
But it seems this wasn’t enough for him. He needed to do more. He ventured to do what businessmen rarely do: talk about politics. He began by writing a letter to the editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal in 1981 criticizing the bail-out of crony businesses by the government despite the declining economy. At the height of the powers of the dictatorship, there was little support for what he did, and he was even called “crazy, stupid and suicidal.” This was despite the later revelation that 60 percent of Benguet was controlled by Kokoy Romualdez, the brotherin-law of the president.
In 1983, even before Ninoy Aquino was assassinated, he started to speak about the mismanagement of the economy because of authoritarianism. Reading his speeches he was bold, frank and stinging. He became popular among the oppositionists. He emerged to become one of the main organizers of the convenor group, along with Cory Aquino and Lorenzo Tañada, to unite the opposition. He became instrumental in rallying the business sector’s support for Cory Aquino during the snap presidential elections of 1986, and when People Power happened, he was offered the post of finance secretary. He thought he could serve better in the private sector, but he reluctantly accepted when Cory said, “I didn’t ask for my job either.”
He was always willing to make unpopular decisions. He suggested that we honor our foreign debts even if it was acquired by the previous corrupt regime. As we say now, “ang utang ay utang.” Aquino adopted this as her policy. But, using private sector management techniques to make People Power work got him entangled in a Cabinet collision and bickering, which eventually ended in him tendering his courtesy resignation in September 1987 which the president accepted. That same month, he was ironically runnerup for Finance Minister of the Year in the Euromoney Awards. But he did not receive the same kind of affirmation from his own countrymen. Understandably, he suffered from “clinical depression,” and by year’s end, he made a fateful tragic decision.
But I do not want Jimmy to be remembered only as the Cabinet secretary who took his own life before he turned 50. Some would even say our nation did not deserve a guy like him. But I must say the Filipino people are blessed that such a man of integrity and public conscience walked this land to be our example and serve us.