"Ang has relied on vision, daring and street smarts, coupled with a high sense of social responsibility unparalleled by most of the Filipino business elite.
Several business writers, including our Standard columnist Tony Lopez, have cited businessman Ramon S. Ang as possible presidential material for 2022.
It is quite obvious that aside from the health and safety issues, the coronavirus pandemic has resulted in a massive economic dislocation with millions becoming jobless, small- and medium-scale businesses closing shop, and livelihood opportunities being shattered.
People come 2022 and even this year will be looking for someone who can “save” the economy and provide hope for their future.
Thus, the potential of a billionaire visionary providing that hope becomes quite interesting. Sometime before, in the 2010 elections, another Filipino billionaire, Manny Villar, then a senator, a former Senate President, and former Speaker of the House, tried to woo the voters to elect him senator. He failed, defeated by a political heir who was catapulted by accident of fate to the presidency after the nation mourned the death of his mother, the widow of a political martyr who was, by snap elections and a people power revolt, elevated to leadership as well.
But while in 2010, the central issue in the election campaign was character rather than competence, owing to public condemnation of several controversial deals and acts of people in power, things may be different this time. Though corruption has not stopped, public perception about President Duterte’s remaining untainted is quite evident in his high popularity ratings.
The main issues will be COVID response, quick economic recovery, and a vision to unite people and provide hope for a better future amidst present pessimism.
It is in the competence metric where a billionaire businessman would shine above the other presidentiables.
Ramon See Ang was not to the silver spoon born. His father was a small shopkeeper who retailed spare parts in then Reina Regente, now Jose Abad Santos, in the periphery of Divisoria and Binondo, leading to the Sta. Cruz and second-district Tondo middle class and lower communities.
And like most Filipino-Chinese children, he was introduced to business and hard work at an early age. At eleven, he was already tending the store, assisting his parents.
From there, he wandered into a used-truck yard in Abad Santos, made friends with the owner who was impressed with the young man’s spunk and drive, and bought parts of re-conditioned trucks and heavy equipment from them, later to re-sell in the family store. In his early teens, Ramon had made a few hundred thousand pesos of his own at a time when such was yet a princely sum. But he ploughed on with hard work and a keen nose for opportunities, which included importation of used equipment from Japan, later gravel quarrying.
At the time, Ferdinand Marcos was on an infrastructure binge, and Ramon cashed in on the huge demand for gravel, which probably explains why he has now likewise invested heavily on both the cement business and infrastructure projects on a grand scale.
But he was also an automobile fancier, and while taking a course on mechanical engineering at middle-class Far Eastern University, he became friends with the university president whose family owned the school, and whose wife was the fabled doyenne of the landed aristocracy of Tarlac, Josephine Cojuangco-Reyes. He became the manager of the FEU Tamaraws, and for the first time in their basketball history, the players sported jerseys and jackets that were at par with the richer colleges and universities.
Because of his love for fixing and re-conditioning cars, he became friends of the fourth-generation Cojuangcos, including Mark, who introduced him to father Eduardo, also an automobile fancier. That began a friendship that would last a lifetime, with the politician-business mogul entrusting more and more of the management of San Miguel Corporation to his quick-thinking, articulate and visionary Chinoy friend.
The partnership brought the beer and food giant into even greater heights. The conglomerate is now also into agri-business, cement, petrol, liquor, power generation, hotels, and building world-class infrastructure through PPP’s initiated even before the present administration. Despite the demise of patriarch Danding last year, RSA, as he is fondly called by business associates, nurtures all these business ventures with competent and effective management, always mindful of the huge empire’s corporate social responsibilities.
Currently on track are RSA’s dream project, a huge aerotropolis sitting on more than 2,400 hectares of land in sleepy Bulacan, Bulacan, where light manufacturing and service industries as well as commercial enterprises would flourish amid a world-class airport that would bring the Philippine aviation and tourism industries at par, if not better than some of the world’s best.
RSA together with the President has just inaugurated a flyover that links the SLEX to NLEX, cutting travel time from Buendia to Balintawak to 16 minutes, easing the traffic in EDSA and C-5 with an alternative route that connects Southern Tagalog through Alabang to Makati, Manila, San Juan, Quezon City and on to Northern Luzon. This writer has used it twice since it was opened January 14, on Ramon’s 67th birthday.
Other projects that RSA plans to implement within the next few years include a flyover connecting Marikina in the east to Manila’s port area in the west, straddling the Pasig River, further inter-connecting the East-West traffic flow which now congest into existing North-South highways.
There seems to be no end to RSA’s visions to modernize our infrastructure, using his extraordinary vision and his genius at financial engineering. The mechanic has gone a long, long way from his humble origins helping a modest family business and finishing college in a middle-class university, with no Ivy League credentials, relying on vision, daring and street smarts, coupled with a high sense of social responsibility unparalleled by most of the Filipino business elite.
Right at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he converted SMC’s rum and gin distilleries into producers of much-needed alcohol sanitizers, to ensure that there would be ample supply of disinfectants. He put up instant food kitchens for the poor and placed them in gas stations providing nourishing meals for the marginalized rendered jobless by the pandemic and its lockdowns. The conglomerate distributed food packs and purchased PPEs and test kits to augment the government’s capabilities, and even a mega-testing center. The list of CSR projects boggles the mind.
If competence and compassion are used as metrics of leadership, RSA passes these with flying colors, especially in parlous times such as these.
But the mechanic with a genius for financial engineering has time and again resisted the clamor to throw his hat into the political ring, and even into the presidential sweepstakes of 2022.
“That is not my area of competence,” he told this writer in several meetings and insists that he can help people and the country of his birth without having to enter the political arena.
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While it is still top of mind, let me end with a note of deep admiration for Baguio City Mayor Benjamin Magalong who was drafted as the tracing czar of the fight against the pandemic. Because of a simple misstep in attending a birthday party in The Manor at Camp John Hay where social distancing rules were at times violated, he took command responsibility and forthwith tendered his irrevocable resignation as contact tracing honcho.
His sense of delicadeza is extremely rare in a culture of permissiveness and entitlement. Benjie Magalong is one man to watch in the country’s political future.
