Showcase year

This is supposed to be a year for showcasing the Philippines, as the country takes its turn as chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and prepares to host the summits and numerous other ASEAN meetings during the year.

- ANA MARIE PAMINTUAN

Let's hope participants at the ASEAN events will leave the country impressed instead of thinking that we're doomed to becoming the regional basket case.

We're hosting ASEAN meetings while EDSA is in rehab. We’ re in the middle of a massive corruption scandal, with a crackdown launched with dramatic flair by the Marcos administration, but which now seems to be scrambling to wiggle out of the mess.

ASEAN will be comparing us with Malaysia, which has put its former prime minister and first lady behind bars for large-scale corruption involving its sovereign wealth fund. If our flood control scandal goes the same way as the fertilizer fund and pork barrel scams, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., instead of remaking his father’s image, willbe cementing his family’s reputation for kleptocracy.

Flood control is part of public infrastructure — the inadequacy of which is one of the biggest problems cited for the unattractiveness of the country for foreign direct investments and tourism.

Being the holder of the revolving ASEAN chair, we should be maximizing the opportunities opened up by our hosting of international gatherings, which will include summits with leaders of ASEAN dialogue partners and observer states.

Those opportunities should help us at least narrow the gap with most of the ASEAN states in terms of tourism, where we're eating the dust of the other original members of the regional grouping (and now plus Vietnam, which saw 22 million tourist arrivals in 2025). We're now just slightly ahead of Cambodia, and it may soon overtake us if it draws more Korean and Chinese tourists.