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BY SONIA D. DAQUILA
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Monday, May 29, 2017
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IN THE international convention held at Casa Real in Iloilo City on May 25, 2017, the chairperson of the Commission on Higher Education, Patricia Licuanan, mentioned about a nation as an “imagined community”. Indeed, true. Imagine the 7,107 islands scattered in the archipelago forming the Philippines as a nation.
When we try to understand ourselves as a people and as a country, we use our imagination when we formulate workable topics. We create paradigms, we formulate theories, then we go to the field to prove or disprove our hypothesis when we search answers to so many questions.
The current state of our nation invites us to imagine how the 72-year-old President Rodrigo Roa Duterte confronts crisis: the Marawi City on fire, the dead bodies scattered, the soldiers killed, the whistling bullets coming from both sides, the evacuees crying for help, the New People’s Army and National Democratic Front withdrawing from peace talks, the natural calamities, the much criticized martial law imposed in the entire Mindanao, the unending reports on billions worth of shabu, of human trafficking, the rising prices of prime commodities, corruption, the South China Sea issues, and many more.
All Philippine presidents have their respective paradigms and are mostly imagined because many aspirations have remained as imagination, if not delusion. No Philippine president has ever been spared from crisis, how tough, how resilient and efficient they were, historical facts reveal.
So now, what could be the paradigm of Duterte’s government and why?
“Change” is the byword of his administration and could have been a magic word for the Filipino people who hunger for “change for the better”. For his part, the infamous Ferdinand Marcos, said, “This country will be great again.” Who does not want greatness? But, Marcos instead gave us huge foreign indebtedness, shame and pain.
On foreign policies, President Duterte is pragmatic for not declaring war against China to impose the United Nations Arbitral Tribunal decision to uphold our rights, and instead, befriended the Chinese government because we may only have the guts but we are incapacitated to match their warfare.
We may also review our history and see how America betrayed us in the Spanish war, how lopsided was the arrangement on the lease of our land for the American military bases, and check the facts that all previous presidents were American-sponsored.
We may likewise see how the United Nations is controlled by the mega-power. Russia therefore, for the present administration, is better than America.
President Duterte expressed his unwillingness to accept aids from America and the European Union because “we are not beggars”. Yet, we have remained as a country of mendicants. The impression has remained that many of our overseas workers are mostly prostitutes and good only as slaves in foreign lands despite a number of well-educated, talented and intelligent Filipinos.
Turning now to Russia and China for friendship, for business, and most of all for LOANS, shall not liberate us from indebtedness. Characteristically, foreign loans were the source of Marcos building here and there then, and the edifices built in the name of culture by Imelda turned out to be white elephants. Accordingly, LOANS are indebtedness even of the unborn Filipinos. Clearly, in politics, there is only one thing which is permanent, “interest”. The same is true with international relations. There is no such thing as a “free lunch”.
On the economy, the government reduces taxes for the low income group and squeezes more from the middle and the highest earning groups. It imposes higher excise taxes. Thus, it adds, yet it subtracts more from the people by pushing prices of commodities higher.
Criminality is still on the rise. Illegal drugs seem inexhaustible and the prisons are not correctional institutions anymore. For the inmates, including those innocents implicated, to be detained in a crowded cell is a slow and painful death worse than execution.
Ridiculously, Marcos was never imprisoned for a case of plunder. This biggest criminal of the country is now buried among the heroes despite the Filipinos’ objection, and the infamous “queen of corruption”, Janet Napoles is eyed to be a state witness against her cohorts, her fellow corrupt creatures.
In the Philippines, the easy way for the “honorables” or “excellences” to escape jail is to feign illness or to be under house/hospital arrest.
In politics, the campaign to adopt federalism, and the support of the punong barangays, is a reminder how the Marcos regime seemingly obtain approval of his scheme from the grassroots; how he manipulated the change of the Philippine Constitution to suit his plot for dictatorship; how Marcos flaunted the legality and constitutionality of his deeds according to statutory law, his decrees, all according to the 1973 Constitution.
Political dynasty is never addressed until now. We see power revolving among the political elites, the rise of private armies and the utter disrespect of human rights. Corruption never ends.
It is not easy to be a dictator in this country, only, if all realize what democracy is, and the millennials particularly, able to distinguish facts from imagination. (delsocorrodaquila@gmail.com/PN)
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