IN the first part of this series last week, I critiqued President Rodrigo Roa Duterte’s three pledges as monumental failures. “Operation Tokhang,” his flagship program on war on illegal drugs, left in its wake thousands of dead Filipinos, meriting him a possible indictment at the International Criminal Court at the Hague. But in fairness to PRRD, “universal values” permeating human rights are slanted towards Western cultural prejudices, distorting Asian standards.
But his pompous declaration of eradicating graft and corruption, his second pledge, turned out to be a politician’s bold-faced play to the voters telling them what they want to hear. There are many facets to corruption, but what is familiar and pervasive to our Philippine experience is the inherently defective systemic political structures that undermine good governance and democracy.
Political patronage
To better understand these concepts, we go back to our historical and cultural roots. Patronage was a feature in our society and existed in pre-Hispanic times when traditional filial ties inevitably morphed into dependence on a benefactor, the “patron,” to an even extreme relationship of subservience between maharlika/timawa and alipin sagigilid. In our political ecosystem, we evolve a complicated practice of political patronage where the people we elect to power dispenses state resources rewarding the populace, principally the voters for their support allowing their continued stay in power.
Neither an upright leader presiding over systemic structural defects will succeed, nor would an immoral leader over a structurally sound one. A moral man paired with a good system under the rule of law are the fundamentals for good governance. Duterte and the system fail on both counts. To be fair but flippant, “…even if you put Jesus Christ on top of the Philippine bureaucracy, he would fail.”
His third pledge — revisions to the 1987 Constitution — signaled his intentions that systemic restructuring and political reforms are a must. On this he miserably failed, too.
The rule of law
I quote excerpts from my column years back clarifying the Deegong’s role under the rule of law: “In a democracy under which we claim we practice, prudent laws are its foundation and the glue that binds a civilized society. It is imperative that the laws laid down by government must be followed by all its citizens. The simplicity of the concept of the rule of law is oftentimes made complicated by those authorized to uphold it. And the President by virtue of his ascendancy granted by the Constitution also has the primary guardianship of that Constitution conferred on him. He must therefore uphold its principles.”
This is key to advancing the President’s legacy — a purposeful grasp of the mechanics of the rule of law. He need not employ histrionics as adjuncts to his image to enforce the law. He is already feared. He just needs to be respected. Braggadocio doesn’t enhance great leadership, humility does.
His successes
Admittedly, Duterte has had many successes. I count among them his elevating Filipino pride severing our umbilical cord from Mother America. Not that we are ungrateful, but his pivot away from America toward an independent foreign policy posture perfunctorily terminates US colonial presence since 1898; although Western cultural influence remains pervasive still.
But this choice too is double-edged. We were handed a potent international legal weapon at the arbitral courts negating China’s nine-dash line. But for reasons only known to Duterte, he set this aside. By default, China could drive us inexorably back to America’s embrace.
Poverty, health and the economy
Duterte reduced poverty incidence in the country from 23.5 percent to 16.7 percent by the end of 2019 — a significant 6.8 percentage point reduction, or 6.1 million Filipinos. Covid-19 canceled these gains.
Economic reforms, particularly the Tax Reform Law (Train), allowed middle- and low-income citizens to keep more of their income for consumption and savings. Tax was shifted to goods on sugar-sweetened drinks, cigarettes, cars and fuel. still burdening the poor while relieving the lower end with cash transfer assistance. The Rice Tariffication Law removed monopolistic rice importation pressuring prices downward, the biggest budget item in food consumption. But while this greatly helped the populace in the urban areas, the effects on rural palay farmers may turn out to be adverse.
The poverty-stricken were alleviated by the enactment of the Universal Health Care Law allowing the poorest Filipinos access to hospitals and medicines. Added to these are free college education and increases in pay for teachers, policemen and soldiers.
Infrastructure
Aware of the need for the country to grow and invest in the future, an aggressive infrastructure was put in place; power, telecommunications, roads, and bridges under the Build, Build, Build program. These were financed from borrowings from institutions with complete trust on the Philippines’ capacity to pay. The country achieved its highest ever credit rating — BBB+ in April 2020, despite Covid-19.
Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles recited a litany of accomplishments, including the construction and rehabilitation of thousands of kilometers of roads, bridges, flood mitigation structures and classrooms. The information superhighway connects the internet to people and provinces, providing opportunities for economic growth.
The endgame
These achievements, with many still in the pipeline, indeed enhance Duterte’s legacy. But in the next 15 months, more still has to be demanded of his leadership. He needs to decouple from the ugly maelstrom of politics now engulfing his presidency; for one, the singular ego-driven thought that he alone can finish what he started. This thought process is fed by the enablers and sycophants who have been presenting a scenario for succeeding himself in the next administration. The permutations are infinite: as mentioned, daughter Sara runs, with him as her vice president; then, son Polong will run, or son Baste or eventually another family member.
Off hand, the Deegong’s legacy must not involve the perpetuation of his political dynasty. This was once central to his belief in changing the constitution. John Raña, his close friend, has this to say: “A Duterte-Duterte tandem will be seen as the ultimate political dynasty…while there are precedents in the case of the Macapagals and Aquinos, there were long intervening periods between the terms of parents and offspring….”
As initiated by Congress, constitutional amendments are possible only for inputting liberalized foreign direct investment or FDI provisions to attract quality investments. Congress will not allow constitutional revisions for federalism, parliamentary government, and other critical political reforms. The center has won. The Centrist Democrats (CD) and the periphery have lost. Perhaps another time, beyond our lives.
Gauging performances is a subjective exercise. Maintaining 80-percent approval rating is not a mark of greatness — just a sign of popularity any actor can achieve. But the Deegong is to be judged harsher than a mere mortal — in exchange for our gift of the presidency. To date, his monumental failures on unfulfilled promises far outweigh his achievements which by reason of his ascendancy are expected of him. Boy Scout merit badges are not awarded for triumphs but failures demand condemnation. Such is the burden of leadership.
In the end, with his legacy repaired, this Davaoeño may yet surprise us — not as an ordinary president but perhaps a great one. But that is a long shot!
The joint resolution that seeks to amend certain “restrictive” provisions in the 1987 Constitution was adopted by the House Committee on Constitutional Amendments on Tuesday.
Resolution of Both Houses 2 (RBH 2), introduced by Speaker Lord Allan Velasco, got the vote of 64 members of the Committee on Constitutional Amendments. Three lawmakers voted against it, while three abstained.
RBH 2 amends Articles 12, 14 and 16 to ease restrictions in the foreign ownership and management of lands of public domain, public utilities, educational institutions, and mass media companies. Inserting the phrase “unless otherwise provided by law” in certain provisions in the Constitution would allow Congress to enact laws lifting prohibitions on foreign entities.
The committee excluded the original proposal to ease restrictions in the foreign ownership of private lands under Section 7, Article 7 of the Constitution.
The panel conducted three hearings and listened to resource persons from the legal, economic and business sectors.
Rep. Alfredo Garbin Jr., chairman of the constitutional amendments panel, said he expects RBH 2 to be tackled in the plenary in the second or third week of February.
The approval of the resolution coincided with the 34th anniversary of the ratification of the 1987 Constitution.
In filing RBH 2, Velasco sought to liberalize the restrictive economic provisions to open up the country to foreign investors and to attract foreign capital that is “critical” to support recovery from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Albay Rep. Jose Maria Clemente “Joey” Salceda, chairman of the ways and means committee, projected that the passage of RBH 2 might lead to an additional average annual foreign direct investments of P330 billion and could generate 6.6 million jobs over a 10-year period.
Garbin said it was wise for Congress to amend the Constitution by adding the phrase “unless otherwise specified by law.”
This, he said, gives the government “flexibility to consider different circumstances prevailing at different stages of our road to economic development before formulating policies that should be time bound.”
“When the people ratify the proposal to amend the Constitution to insert the phrase ‘unless otherwise provided by law,’ the people will be expressing their desire to make the limitations on foreign ownership and participation less rigid and will be choosing to delegate to Congress the determination of what the appropriate limitations should be. It would be an acknowledgment that, in these particular instances, the specific limitations are no longer wise, and that there is a need for quick, decisive but deliberative action,” Garbin explained.
During the hearing on Tuesday, former 1986 Constitutional Convention member and retired Supreme Court justice Adolfo Azcuna said that when he first proposed the idea of amending the Constitution to then House Speaker Feliciano Belmonte, “the whole idea is to render changeable by legislation those restrictive economic provisions in our Constitution.”
Azcuna said these include “specific details, as distinguished from bedrock principles, which should not be changed by legislation.”
“The details can be changed by legislation — and should be changed by legislation — since they are not meant to last for a long time,” he said.
Highlighting the importance of reviewing the economic provisions amid the effects of the pandemic, Azcuna said the “economic policy should be flexible; it should not be written in stone.”
Deputy Minority Leader and Bayan Muna Rep. Carlos Isagani Zarate, one of the lawmakers who voted against RBH 2, said charter change, or Cha-cha, would not solve the economic crisis.
“If Cha-cha pushes through now then foreigners would have a heyday and gobbling up wholesale of what is left in our already much liberalized economy. Our national patrimony would be put on sale to the highest foreign bidder at the further expense of our local industry.”
Last of 2 parts
THIS second part on the Covid-19 vaccine puts into perspective the need for massive vaccination as a precondition to lifting the lockdowns and reviving the global economy.
Lockdowns, the knee-jerk solution to the pandemic, have exacted an intolerable toll assaulting the global economic jugular, and these are not altruistic. Oxfam International reports that “…this crisis is aggravating inequality, with the richest quickly getting richer while it will likely take years for the world’s poorest to recover…the 1,000 richest people on the planet recouped their Covid-19 losses within just nine months, but it could take more than a decade for the world’s poorest to recover.”
The path to global economic recovery is clear. And experts now agree that lockdowns should be lifted simultaneously or in tandem to be effective in stimulating international trade. Leaving pockets of the contagion will just allow it to spike all over again.
Vaccine nationalism — first to the privileged
We also outlined the inequitable access to the cure. Pragmatism comes into the picture as the dynamics of the market allow preferential treatment for the industrialized countries being the catalysts for economic recovery — the United States, China, Russia, the European Union, India, the Asian Tigers and Japan representing 70 percent of the world’s GNP.
Trump’s executive order set the tone prioritizing access to US-made vaccines for Americans. Europe is pursuing the same. The effect of preordering billions of doses to protect their own citizens’ lives several times over is tantamount to exclusion against poor nations, while pushing prices up. But this is the name of the game. Big Pharma and public health are big business. So, in a world of disparities, the rich comes first, simply following the dictums of Darwin’s truisms.
Digressing a little, what the world really faces now is more complicated than just the scarcity of vaccines for everyone.
Life before the vaccines
Prior to the vaccines, we were helpless and naked to infection and death; now there are more than 102 million cases worldwide resulting in 2.2 million Covid-19 deaths. This fear was borne out of our collective memory singularly driven by several pandemics in the last millennia. The 1918 Spanish Flu killed 50 million and we extrapolated the kill rate to the current contagion. The “Black Death” of the Middle Ages conjured up similar images of dead bodies collected daily from houses and burned in piles or buried in common graveyards.
The present-day equivalent gruesome images are of bodies taken out from the ICUs after detaching the intubated ventilators from the lungs of the dead, and the shrouded bodies sent to the morgues, or stacked up in refrigerated vans taking up the slack as mortuaries have become congested. The lucky families get to escort them to the crematoria. Loved ones could not even be visited at the hospitals. We see terrible lonely deaths. Our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters without us at their bedsides at the moment of death. No goodbyes and lingering farewells. These are the vivid images that create fear. These fears are real, not self-induced.
Vaccine-induced fear
But after traumatic months of waiting, the vaccine is now being rolled out in millions of doses. Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, the Big Pharma complemented by Sputnik, Sinovac and Sinopharm — all dispensed under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA), a valid health protocol to skirt the years normally required to have a vaccine thoroughly tested and brought to market. It is akin to a license for Big Pharma with governments’ consent for public use with no liabilities attached, just inherently acceptable risks; with choices left to each individual — to be vaccinated or not. But our perspectives have suddenly changed. Our fears have become self-induced.
Antivaccine movement
Forty percent of Americans don’t plan to get vaccinated (Todd Ackerman, Houston Chronicle, December 2020). An American reflecting the opinions of the many doesn’t want to be “…a science experiment for a vaccine against a virus that has a very high survival rate.” Vaccines which were meant to alleviate the fears of infection and terrors conjured up over the months have morphed our fears. Vaccines kill people — infected or not. So, the fear of death by Covid-19 infection is substituted by the fear of death by vaccination.
The antivaxxer movement has always been vocal on the fringes regurgitating pseudoscientific data. In America it was motivated by some spurious study that vaccinations produce “autism spectrum disorders (ASD)” in many children. This false claim originated in the late 1990s principally by a certain Andrew Wakefield, a British physician whose misinformation and half-truths were widely circulated, gaining traction. Earlier in 2020, conspiracy theories shaped around Bill Gates, supposedly abetted by Dr. Anthony Fauci, proliferated, purportedly creating both the coronavirus and the vaccines in secret laboratories; implanting the latter with microchips to be injected to billions of people to track their movements. The MAGA, QAnon movements and rightist cohorts swear by these.
Herd immunity
But known to the medical profession are the imperatives of a cure. What constitutes treatment for the pandemic is not as simple as it seems. Although scientists are not unanimous, herd immunity is pursued as the best course to arrest the spread. Accordingly, “Herd or community immunity, is when a large part of the population of an area is immune to a specific disease. If enough people are resistant to the cause of a disease, such as a virus or bacteria, it has nowhere to go.
“While not every single individual may be immune, the group as a whole has protection.
This is because there are fewer high-risk people overall. The infection rates drop, and the disease peters out. Herd immunity protects at-risk populations. These include babies and those whose immune systems are weak and can’t get resistance on their own.” (WebMD).
There are two ways to build immunity. When one is infected and recovered, the antibodies that fought off the infection avert another attack. The second method is vaccination to build resistance making the body immune to the disease. Epidemiologists suggest that 50 percent to 67 percent of the population need to be resistant before herd immunity becomes viable and infection rates start to go down.
PH situation
In the Philippines, a Pulse Asia survey showed that almost half of the population are not inclined to get the Covid-19 vaccine. Social media proliferates with horror stories of their deleterious effects and the risk of dying. There is a precedent to this doubt as there were instances of kids dying after being vaccinated by Dengvaxia — a corruption-driven vaccinations initiative against “dengue fever” by the health bureaucracy several years back.
The way things are going, the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases is in the process of ordering the vaccine — from God knows where and at what prices, costs and firm commitments. These are all supposedly confidential, a nice euphemism to cover for possible corrupt negotiations.
What should bother our political leadership is that unless herd immunity is achieved, lockdowns must stay in place and the economy further deteriorates with no recovery in sight. Thanks to the pasaway and our antivaxxers, we revert to our “Bahala na, matira ang matibay.” And in the end, we will all be dead anyway!