Yakult consigns entire nation to poor digestive health

I AM presently in the midst of one of those occasional time periods when the necessary research on topics — some for this space, and some for other purposes, such as the forthcoming 2024 edition of “The Manila Times 500” business guide — is taking a bit longer than my weekly publishing schedule allows. Thus, today’s installment is a kind of intermission, a column of “loose ends,” as it were, interesting issues that are significant enough to acknowledge but perhaps not individually deserving of an entire 1,000-word exposition.

The tiresome announcement of yet another “transport strike” by malcontent members of the Piston and Manibela jeepney drivers’ associations — calling them “unions,” as they’ve been referred to in some foreign media, is undeservedly generous — certainly should not be worth much attention at this point. This pack of troublemakers has managed to delay the progress of the Public Utility Vehicle Modernization Program (PUVMP) for nearly seven years and are again whining that their rights are being trampled on.

The government is apparently over it, at least for now; a final deadline of April 30 for the remaining holdouts to sign up for the program has been set, with the Marcos administration explicitly announcing that no more extensions would be granted. This prompted the two groups to declare a “transport strike” for April 15 and 16, promising to “paralyze” public transportation across the country.

Yakult consigns entire nation to poor digestive health

Whether or not any place was actually “paralyzed” is unknown, but unlikely; the resisters to the program seem to be concentrated in Metro Manila, with participation in the PUVMP scheme reported at 80 percent or more elsewhere. Paralysis certainly was not evident around any of the three busy transport terminals in my neighborhood; that was also the case during the last “transport strike,” the one before that, or any of the half-dozen or so “transport strikes” before that. The only trouble I heard about, though there may have been some elsewhere, was a report of a clash between protesters and police near UP Diliman, which caused a traffic jam along Commonwealth Avenue during the evening rush hour.

I realize that driving a jeepney must be a tough way to earn a living, but maybe it is because those who claim to be the most downtrodden by it insist that it is their right to pursue that livelihood by operating manifestly unsafe and environmentally unsound vehicles according to a grossly inefficient system. In the end, though, it is not a small group of unreformable jeepney drivers who are to blame for the embarrassing delay in progress but the government’s own lack of resolve. It should have been manifestly clear several “transport strikes” ago that the loss of the uncooperative minority of jeepney operators would require no more than minor adjustments to transport routes, but so far, no one in this administration or the previous one has demonstrated that they have the cojones to do what should have been done a long time ago and show the “activist” drivers the door. We can only hope that the leadership will man up this time.

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For the sake of my mental wellness, I generally try to avoid politics, whether in my homeland or here in my adopted home; that way lies madness, and my default assumption about anyone who makes a career of being an elected official is that they couldn’t hack it in a real job. There are exceptions, of course; I recently met Iloilo Mayor Jerry Treñas, who is doing outstanding work in his city, and I have been pleasantly surprised by a few others through the years.

Davao del Norte Rep. and former House speaker Pantaleon Alvarez is not one of those exceptions, however. This is one of those characters whose name throughout his entire career only seems to appear in the news in connection with some highly dubious activity; most recently, he has come under fire for publicly calling for the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to “withdraw support” from President Marcos Jr., because the current president is not properly catering to the whims of the Chinese overlords as submissively as the former president and Alvarez’s political pole star did.

That is too astonishing even for me to ignore, and I come from a place where a convicted sex offender who has been found liable multiple times for massive financial fraud and is currently on trial for election interference — with no fewer than 80 other criminal charges pending after the ones in that proceeding — could conceivably be elected president.

It is one thing for a sitting member of Congress to decide he is part of the opposition to the President; it is quite another to openly call for military insurrection. What the House of Representatives or any other part of the government should do about Alvarez, I would not presume to suggest, but if they wish to maintain the appearance of an orderly, well-behaved state — the sort that can properly welcome investors and properly tell the International Criminal Court to buzz off — they should not let him and his big mouth off the hook.

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Finally, I would like someone from Yakult Philippines to explain why they are so bad at forecasting that the single product they produce cannot be found anywhere in Metro Manila. Yakult has been rarer than neutronium for weeks, and it would be one thing if it were a sudden development, but it’s happened before, at least twice. What makes it particularly annoying is that in his 2024 message to investors, the company’s president said, “Since the fact remains that overseas markets (i.e., outside Japan) have high growth potential, we believe that our activities suited to the situation of each country and region will bear fruit.”

Having beliefs is good, but that one isn’t working, at least not here. Everyone likes Yakult, particularly someone like me, whose preferred level of spiciness in most meals leans toward “capable of melting granite,” Yakult is stomach joy in a bottle. Don’t you want your customers to experience joy, Yakult? Pull yourselves together, and ship some product already.

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