(Speech delivered by Sen. Manny Villar at Carnegie Council, Merrill House, 170 East 64th Street, New York).

Conclusion

It was as an entrepreneur that I found my calling—first as a fish dealer, then as an owner of a gravel-and-sand business, and finally as the pioneer in the low-cost housing industry in the Philippines.

It was in the housing business that I connected with millions of Filipinos. They were what I was like years ago. They could not even imagine a future because they were not sure of surviving this very day.

In the communities I have helped build, I have seen with my own eyes how a poor man and his family’s dignity and pride were restored when they had decent shelter to shield them from the elements. With dignity and pride restored, a renewed sense of energy and of hope followed. Families began to dream. Parents started having visions of a better tomorrow for their children. A sense of community even began to grow.

This is what has been missing in the Philippines for many decades. We have concentrated far too much on the form of democracy but have missed out on its substance.

Democracy is all about empowering the powerless. Empowerment not only through the exercise of the right of suffrage but also through the opportunity to maximize one’s God-given potential.

Poverty robs the individual of that opportunity to maximize one’s potential. Pervasive poverty robs a whole country’s potential. In a country where so many millions are poor, so much potential is waiting to be unlocked.

We need to unlock that potential and unlock it in a massive way.

As early as 1881, as I told you, Graciano Lopez-Jaena understood what we had to do.

Indeed, today we need to invest in infrastructure and have roads that criss-cross our archipelago. We need to invest in housing and in building new communities. We need to build more schools. Improve our hospitals. We need to spur our economy and secure for our people their freedom from poverty, hand in hand with their cherished political freedoms.

The responsibility is primarily with government. But it must tap the private sector to supplement its efforts. This is best done by providing private enterprise an environment for healthy competition while stepping out of the way.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have tried to paint for you an image of the Philippines that is stark but real.

I appreciate the interest you have shown in the affairs of my country and people, a country and people whose lives have been so intertwined with the United States ever since Admiral George Dewey demolished the Spanish navy in Manila Bay in 1898.

Thus, I find it fitting that as my country celebrates its 111th year of its declaration of independence from Spain,

I am here today to explain to you why we need to launch a new war for independence—an independence from the poverty that devalues the hallowed principles and practices of democracy that were perhaps the greatest legacy of America to the Philippines.

President Kennedy once remarked that a government that cannot help the many who are poor cannot save the few who are rich. In truth, the rich can take care of themselves; it is for the millions who are poor that a government must mainly devote its time and effort and resources.

This, if I am chosen by the people to lead the next government of the Philippines, will be the focus of my administration.

Having risen from the ranks of the poor, I fully understand that this new war for independence from poverty must now be waged by government with the right resources, with an unwavering focus—and with an understanding of the every day reality of a poor man’s plight that perhaps only someone who has been there can have.

Mabuhay!