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1995, the year I got into TOWNS (The Outstanding Women in the Nation’s Service), Lilia de Lima already was one of the Foundation’s bright lights. But that was only the year then-president Fidel V. Ramos appointed her director general of PEZA (Philippine Economic Zone Authority). The job found her, and as many would attest to, it was meant for her — the only public servant perhaps the late president Benigno Simeon Aquino III had wished, and expressed, could be cloned.
It was her moment of enfranchisement or empowerment, as the celebrity biography type is “widely seen as transformative but with markedly varying political significance: it would be described as a form of enfranchisement and empowerment.”
She remarkably rose to its challenges, transformed a government office and its staff to one of genuine public service and integrity, and remained as such for 21 years, up till 2016 when she retired.
As Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala (JAZA), CEO of the Ayala Corporation, would say in his Foreword to the book, she was “no ordinary public servant.” She was tenacious, immensely proud in her work, and a beacon of integrity. He had interacted with her countless times, his many businesses saw firsthand how De Lima became the central driver who turned PEZA into the country’s foremost investment promotion agency. It was JAZA who nudged her to write her memoir as her legacy to public service.
Biography is always first considered a historical activity, and only secondly, as a literary genre. Its growth since the last quarter of the 20th century has been phenomenal and its types as multiple as lives lived in the world. They are basically expected to be true “accounts (and stories) others can use about meaning, nature and culture, the functioning of the psyche, the relations of public to private experience and of larger historical forces to individual experience.”
De Lima was already in the Ramos administration, as Commissioner in the National Amnesty Commission (NAC), negotiating for peace by offering rebel returnees sustainable income generation. And before that, she was in domestic and international trade. Still before that, she was a delegate to the 1971 Constitutional Convention where she established long-lasting bonds with many like-minded, well-meaning people. But call it destiny, or history, it chose her for this particular role that consumed her every waking hour, but which also gave her an immeasurable sense of fulfillment.
When she was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Laureate in 2017, she admitted the PEZA years were her life-defining journey. As she retells in great detail throughout the book, it was not a walk in the park. She describes it as bruising to turn a bloated corrupt bureaucracy into a lean, competent, no-graft, no-corruption, no-red-tape only red-carpet service for all of PEZA’s stakeholders.
The book so aptly called Breakthrough is Director General Lilia de Lima’s narration of the years specific only to when she ran PEZA, the Philippine Economic Zone Authority, from 1995 to 2016, a solid 21 years. This is why, apart from two to three references to her parents when tracing back her certain traits, there is hardly anything here about her family, her childhood in a brood of 11, her education, and early work before she became a 1971 ConCon delegate.
The chapters open with well-selected quotes from different CEOs or other key officers of the international companies. Within chapters are even more significant reflections of De Lima’s, set off and highlighted — a collection of these quotations could easily be a mini-guide to successful and effective leadership. The stories abound, often funny: how forcing herself to eat goto swimming in fat turned decisions in her favor; how women were preferred welders in heavy industries like shipbuilding and men ended up in hairstyling; how a canceled appointment in Taipei brought her to their IT parks which started it all for our country in Metro Manila, southern Luzon, and Cebu; how she traveled light with only one staff; how she had to pound the table really hard to show the macho honchos she meant business; how disconcerted she was by how the Japanese businessmen avoided eye contact with her, and she thought it was because she was a woman, only to be told later that generally they found eye-to-eye contact rude.
There is a chapter on her own personal joint venture with President Cory: they painted to relax. And another on PEZA’s famous and enjoyable staging of broadway excerpts, for both her staff performers and for their audiences. When asked how she survived four presidents, in jest she said:
“In FVR’s time, I was always hungry; during Erap’s time, we were always served good food.” When asked about GMA, she replied: “Well, it was easier to please male bosses and I wouldn’t dare add anything beyond that.”
In the absence of an author’s Preface or Introduction, that lays down her process of remembering and validating, we can only surmise that perhaps recollections are helped heavily by research, both printed and oral. I also speculated that maybe there was a journal or diary, or an album of newspaper clippings, or a folder of copies of landmark memoranda and office procedures or cases, tons of pictures, trophies and certificates, and other memorabilia one tends to accumulate in a long remarkable career. So I asked her in a quick Zoom meeting how she remembered everything considering how exceptionally detailed and rich her accounts are. She explained that as she wrote a chapter, she had it checked and counter-checked by her former deputies and other key officers.
I also asked if she had no stories of settling conflicts with labor because economic zones are strike-free. Lilia clarified that it’s a false assumption; she paused awhile, “You’re right, I don’t have stories about the workers — they had fair wages.”
In her Afterword, she explicitly says what this memoir is for: as a record of a good part of her life, 21 years of running a government office as it should be, in the interest of a nation and our people, and not for a family dynasty. A government office must always conduct itself true to the spirit of public service. So extremely and so badly needed in these times when many who claim to be public servants are the very same people who at every chance they get, or even make, steal the people’s money. – Rappler.com
Karina Bolasco was a book publisher all her working life. She ran Anvil Publishing and Ateneo de manila University Press. She now serves as Head of Curation and Literary Program Committees of the Philippines Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2025.
