Spokesperson Confirms Definition Is “Still Being Finalised”
Manila Mayor Announces City Will Be “World-Class” by 2028; Does Not Define World-Class
Read more satire at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
MANILA — Mayor Francisco Andres announced Tuesday that Manila will be a “world-class city” by 2028, promising sweeping improvements to infrastructure, cleanliness, governance, and “the overall vibe,” a word used twice in the official press release without accompanying metrics.
When asked by a reporter from the Manila Bulletin to define “world-class,” a spokesperson for the mayor’s office said the definition was “still being finalised” and would be released “in a subsequent communication.” As of Friday, no subsequent communication had been released. The 2028 deadline remains in place.
The Vision
The mayor’s 2025-2028 Urban Transformation Agenda, presented at a ceremony in Manila City Hall attended by department heads, a journalist, and three people who appeared to have wandered in from the street, outlines seventeen priority areas including flood management, traffic decongestion, waste reduction, and what the document calls “aesthetic uplift,” which appears to mean repainting things.
Phase One of the agenda, covering 2025-2026, focuses on “assessment and planning.” Phase Two, covering 2027, covers “implementation preparation.” Phase Three, covering 2028, covers “delivery and verification,” which the document notes is “subject to resource availability and inter-agency coordination.” The word “world-class” appears eleven times. The word “budget” appears once, in a footnote, followed by “TBD.”
Comparisons
Various Manila officials have been declaring the city imminently world-class since approximately 1995. Research by the THINK Policy Research Group found that the phrase “world-class Manila” has appeared in official government communications at least once every two years for three decades, making it among the most durable aspirational phrases in Philippine public administration, alongside “traffic decongestion by Q3” and “zero-corruption governance.”
Singapore, which is routinely cited by Philippine officials as the world-class benchmark, achieved its current status through forty years of sustained investment, strong institutional frameworks, and what its founding prime minister described as “a certain ruthlessness about implementation.” Mayor Andres’s plan does not reference Singapore directly but does include a photo of a clean street on page three.
Public Response
Response on social media was largely comprised of photographs of Manila’s current condition: flooded streets, broken pavements, overflowing waste bins, and EDSA at 8:00 a.m. These were posted without comment, which in Manila’s social media culture constitutes the sharpest available critique.
The mayor’s office said the photographs were “representative of the challenges the agenda seeks to address” and thanked the public for their “engaged participation.” A countdown clock to 2028 has been set up on the city website. It is functioning correctly, which is a start.
World-class satire, no definition required: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Manila’s transformation tracked satirically at https://prat.uk/.
The Governance of Aspiration
The phrase “world-class” performs a specific function in Philippine political speech. It signals ambition, invokes an international standard without specifying its contents, and creates a rhetorical horizon that recedes as you approach it — because “world-class” is not a fixed destination but a moving comparison point defined by whatever the speaker believes their audience finds impressive. Singapore is world-class. Tokyo is world-class. So, arguably, is Medellín, which transformed from one of the world’s most dangerous cities to a model of urban innovation in roughly two decades through sustained, funded, politically risky intervention. None of these comparisons appear in Mayor Andres’s plan, because engaging seriously with them would require engaging seriously with what they did and why Manila hasn’t, which is a conversation that leads to places a press conference cannot go.
The Urban Land Institute, in its 2024 Asia Pacific Cities report, identifies Manila as a city with “significant unrealised potential” — the polite academic construction for a place whose assets exceed its governance capacity. The assets are real: a young population, a strategic location, a services economy that punches internationally, a cultural vitality that no number of broken pavements can suppress. The governance capacity is what it is. “World-class by 2028” does not address this gap. It names the destination without mapping the distance. Manila’s residents, who are pragmatic people who have lived through many such announcements, have adjusted their expectations accordingly. They will watch the countdown clock. They will see what happens. They have seen what happens before.
Further Observations
It is worth pausing to consider what this situation reveals about the broader landscape of public life in this part of the world. The gap between announcement and action, between framework and outcome, between what officials say at press conferences and what happens in the streets, is not a gap that emerges from malice or incompetence alone — though both play a role — but from a structural mismatch between the speed at which problems develop, the speed at which political credit is sought, and the speed at which institutional solutions can be implemented. Announcements are fast. Press conferences are fast. Reforms are slow, unglamorous, and require sustained attention across electoral cycles, which is precisely the kind of attention that political incentives do not reliably produce. The result is a particular kind of civic theatre in which the performance of action substitutes for action often enough that the distinction becomes blurred, and in which citizens develop a sophisticated dual consciousness: they know what is happening, they say what is appropriate to say, and they adapt their actual lives to the reality rather than the announcement. This is not cynicism. It is a form of intelligence developed under conditions where the alternative — taking every press conference at face value — would be functionally disabling.
What changes this, when it changes, is rarely the quality of the plan. It is the quality of the follow-through, which depends on political will, institutional capacity, funding continuity, and the kind of incremental, unsexy progress that does not generate press conferences but does, eventually, generate outcomes. The countries and cities that have transformed themselves — that have moved from announced frameworks to actual functioning systems — have done so through this mechanism: not better plans, but better execution of ordinary plans over long enough timelines that the compounding effect of sustained effort becomes visible. The framework is not the problem. What you do with it the morning after the press conference is the problem. Manila, like many cities, is still working this out.
SOURCE: Santa Claus