His was a very difficult job, which made our work as his staff also difficult and challenging, but it came with unexpected and unusual perks.
One of the latter was cold calling the office of the top boss of any other government agency and saying with confidence: “Hello, good morning. This is Teresa from the office of Minister Virata and we need the following information/data/statistics as soon as possible. Can you send it by tomorrow?”
That sass and bravado also often worked in the various data offices of our neighbor, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (then called the Central Bank of the Philippines), much to the annoyance of some of our contemporaries there.
I was among the most junior in the department's totem pole, but it speaks much of how flat and small our staffing then was, that we all always were invited to the FinMin's birthday every December and the Christmas party of the Office of the Minister.
And yeah, he knew all of us by name. The fact that the only photocopy machine was in the Office of the Minister increased the possibility of us being known to him, even the freshest graduates among us. After all, in any organization it was always the youngest ones tasked to do the most menial of tasks, especially photocopying of various documents several times a day.
In the few years when the Philippine government was decreed to be run as parliament, Cesar Virata ran and won as an assemblyman for Cavite and his campaign slogan was “Kabitenyong Maginoo”, a very apt description of the soft-spoken and laconic technocrat that he was. I have always thought that his campaign managers chose this slogan to distinguish him from who was then the more infamous persona from Cavite, the notorious Nardong Putik.
Anyway, from being just an assemblyman, Mr. Virata soon became the Prime Minister, after which he then became the "PM" to all of us.
Later on, when mobile phones became ubiquitous, his was among the first 20 numbers saved on my Nokia, and that was long after he had left the DOF (renamed Department of Finance after the 1986 Edsa Revolution). And yes, he always responded when I texted him.
Much later on, when that first group of young UP School of Economics graduates who formed the core of his Technical Staff/Planning Service had also moved on in our careers, we frequently convened as guests to the PM’s annual birthday lunch every December. The last was December 2025 when friends and former colleagues at DOF, government, and academe met to celebrate the PM’s 95th birthday.
PM Virata died on Friday, Oct. 2, 2026, ending an era that defined technocracy in public service. He wielded a significant amount of power, but he knew the limitations of his time and was pragmatic about it. Pundits will debate his place in economic history, what he could have done but did not do, against what he actually did given those unique set of circumstances.
Among our first tasks in 1977 was to craft a paper titled Developing Fiscal Policies in the '70s. I am sure much of my inputs to that were very theoretical since I was a fresh graduate then. That paper had a couple more variations before we entered what would be the more politically and economically tumultuous '80s.
PM Virata guided us through those years with a firm but kindly hand. He set an example of public service not so much with words, but with the way he lived his life with dignity, humility, integrity, and love of country.
Farewell, dearest PM. Let angels escort you to your final repose in Heaven.
Ms. Habitan served as Assistant Secretary of the Department of Finance where she became a career bureaucrat for 44 years immediately after graduating with a degree in Business Economics from the University of the Philippines. She has a masters degree in D
