There is this French term jamais vu, which is the opposite of déjà vu, which refers to the familiar turning unfamiliar, when a completely recognizable person or condition becomes strange. Yet, jamais vu has become a national ailment, as when people who see graft happening before their very eyes would not recognize it as such, and dismiss it as part of the system, like a cog that makes a machine work. The character Richard Gecko would even elevate greed as a virtue, as “it makes the world go round.”
This is the same moral bankruptcy that justified Ayn Rand’s John Galt, who considers the state and its executive committee, the government, as a snag to the freedom of capitalism to do as it pleases, so long as the state would be three to rescue them when shit hits the fan, like the Crash of 1929 that precipitated the Great Depression. We have these John Galts and Richard Geckos in our midst, and they resemble Ramon Ang, Enrique Razon, Manny Villar (with his hypersonic land valuation and use of political influence to kick out the Ati in Boracay and the Ilongo farmers from their irrigated farms just so he could put up his losing commercial center.)
Unless he is checked, Ramon Ang will eventually become the infrastructure king of the Philippines, with all the tollways and expressways leading to his now-controlled Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) netting him billions. This is the insanity of the award to his consortium: He is now the “real king of the road,” with all those seeking entry to NAIA paying an arm and a leg for highways that the state is supposed to build and maintain for the common good. Without any control over highway construction and the privatization of at least 10 airports, the Marcos Jr. administration is abdicating its duty to abide by the 1987 Constitution, which decreed that the state must promote the people’s welfare.
Certainly, kicking out Bulacan fishermen and farmers from Taliptip, Bulakan, Bulacan, so Ramon Ang can enjoy his car races and permit Filipino oligarchs to showcase their Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Maseratis, Bugattis, Porsches and an alphabet soup of racing cars in competitions that are irrelevant to the lives of ordinary Filipino citizens. On the side, the San Miguel Corp. (SMC) fiefdom will also be the site for the private port of the conglomerate and the world-class New Manila International Airport (NMIA), which will be directly competing with the NAIA, unless climate change sinks the poldered piece of real estate the way Jakarta and Kansai Airport off Osaka in Japan are sinking.
Who benefits from this? It is St. Ramon, who has been hyping his “assistance” to the regime, from the poultry raising and processing plants in Mindanao, to the hydropower plant proposal for the Kaliwa Dam, the coal quarries in South Cotabato, to the takeover of Bugsuk Island in Palawan already awarded to the members of the indigenous communities by the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), with the department officials insisting that the island is not suitable for farming but most appropriate for an airstrip and an ecotourism-whatever-project of Ang, who now can also brag that he is entitled to dozens of infrastructure projects because of his excellent record, which is as white as driven snow. Thus, he is championing another grand project to the principal victim of overtourism in the country—Boracay. There is no place in this country and no group of people are safe from the tinkering, engineering mind of Ramon S. Ang, who must have lost all his hair for thinking about profitable ventures for SMC and its investors like Top Frontier. The indigenous people of Boracay, the Ati, were supposed to have part of the island as their ancestral domain until the ancestral domain of Manny Villar came along and evicted them to build a hotel on the island.
But wait, the Boracay Foundation, Inc. (BFI) also has beef against Ang, who already manages the Caticlan Airport through Trans Aire Development Holdings Corp. but now wants to build the much-hyped P7.95-billion 2.54-km Boracay bridge that links the island to the mainland with a 1.14-km limited access segment. On the basis of the length of the span, taxpayers will bankroll a bridge that would cost more than P3-billion per kilometer. BFI said that before attempting to overstretch his hype, Ang must improve Caticlan airport. Building an unnecessary bridge to Boracay would destroy marine biodiversity and worsen coastal erosion, locals argued. Apparently, local officials are not wont to grant Ang’s fervent plea and, in one instance of a sensitive approach, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) said Ang should first secure authorization from local government units (LGUs) before the Boracay bridge proposal is considered and subjected to a Swiss challenge.
In April 2025, law dean Sol Derequito Mawis, rights lawyer Joel Butuyan, Antonio La Vina, Roger Rayel and Jose Mari Francisco Tirol filed a petition for review for the Supreme Court (SC) to declare Ang consortium’s P170.6-billion concession agreement for NAIA null and void for violating due process and equal protection of the law for the millions of Filipinos using the NAIA. The petitioners cited the fact that the Ang deal was approved after only 47 days and, on Oct. 1, 2024, the New NAIA Infra Corp. (NNIC) immediately imposed increased rates for parking, land lease rentals, office rentals, aircraft landing and takeoff fees and passenger processing fees, all in violation of the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Code enacted on Dec. 5, 2023.
It is a lie for Ang’s rah-rah boys and media operators to shout to the high heavens that the Filipino people accept the inevitability of higher fees for everything at the NAIA. As one of them wrote, it is “worth the wait.” For the group of Mawis and lawyer Eico Domingo, who have joined the fray along with labor unions, migrant workers’ organizations, the concession agreement is “worth the wake,” and the High Court should be the undertaker that should bury it six feet underground. Aside from the protesting organizations, the Air Carriers Association of the Philippines (ACAP), the Board of Airline Representatives (BAR), the Airline Operators Council (AOC) and the International Air Transport Association of the Philippines (IATAP) oppose the imposition of irrational fees. Petitioners said the deal with NNIC exempts public service charges (PSC) from government oversight. This is an outrage inasmuch as aeronautical charges and PSC comprise 74% of NAIA revenues. PSC in itself accounted for the airport’s revenues in 2022. So, Ang and his fellow investors are guaranteed a dozen geese that lay the golden eggs. For the nonce, the High Court must discipline this flibbertigibbet not only promoting illusions but for possessing a lot of people and putting a hex on the columns, like the demon that had to be exorcised in Willam Shakespeare’s “King Lear.”
