President Duterte’s controversial State of the Nation Address (Sona), again spiced with some expletives in the local colloquial language, is considered bereft of discussions on vital economic issues, as people remain patient and tolerant, although ironically want reforms as soon as possible with jobs, poverty, inflation and corruption now on the top of their concerns, and much less for crime and the antidrug campaign based on Pulse Asia’s recent survey.
Ever since he took the national political stage by storm, starting with his wishy-washy decision to gun for the presidency, Duterte has indeed captivated and inspired the hopes of many, particularly his avid followers, the downtrodden hoi polloi as he spoke their language of the streets.
Subservience and rising hubris? His no-holds-barred crass language, which offends many of the well-scented, well-heeled and well-mannered elite, has all the more captivated his followers, particularly his loyal sycophants, minions and trolls, as he makes oblique potshots at big names and institutions, like former US President Obama, the European Union, the Catholic Church, United Nations, human-rights advocates and even media itself.
Despite his shortcomings of being perceived to be short on patience, short on respect for due process, human rights and the law itself, and short of understanding on economic concerns, he keeps coming with his rantings, which have even increased his survey ratings as people blindly follow him without question.
The more he admits his shortcomings and his openness to accept the possibility of even rotting in jail for his faults, the more people love him for his perceived transparency and honesty. Apparently, Filipinos are a tolerant and forgiving lot and want to give him more chances, but it doesn’t mean people are not watching and keeping tab.
One test case is when he defied a Senate probe and pardoned Supt. Marvin Marcos from jail; sentence for the murder in jail of Albuera Mayor Rolando Espinosa Sr. and forcing Sen. Panfilo M. Lacson to utter expletives.
But owing to the people’s culture of subservience, reinforced further by his strongman tendencies, the resulting eerie complacency and tolerance for his malfeasance is increasingly developing the negation of his down-to-earth humility.
By daring to defy social convention and flirt frictions with institutions, he may be developing hubris or arrogance, which is the folly that led to the downfall of many leaders in history who have lost the capacity to take criticisms. His arch political enemies can even capitalize on this and do extremism, and blame everything on him for being tolerant to his erring policemen. Either way, he is not managing well his police force and criminality, neither is he uniting the country, but causing more division.
Fight poverty more, not crime. He seems stuck to just being a law enforcer, and myopically believes his own propaganda by insisting on his static figure of 4 million drug users, even sacking the Dangerous Drugs Board chief for his lower 1.8 million estimate. He must realize that when his campaign started, many stopped using drugs out of fear and that’s good enough.
There is a danger the police may be forced to produce “criminals” out of innocents, just to match his higher figure on the ridiculous argument only 1 million have so far surrendered when there are 4 million.
As poverty, jobs and corruption are the top concerns, Duterte must focus more on poverty eradication, without giving up his war on drugs and terrorists. It is poverty in the countryside that is causing the massive rural-to-urban migration of rural folks escaping from rural misery only to end up in urban poverty.
Top of class vs corruption. He can tap, say, the top 2,000 graduates of state universities and colleges to do parallel counter-checking to wipe out corruption at the Bureau of Customs. My friend Dave Garcia suggests to give them a salary of P20,000, with P15,000 released every month and the remaining P5,000 by the end of the year if they perform effectively and honestly. This carrot-and-stick approach is effective because if they foul up they lose the accumulated P60,000 in forced savings, lose their jobs, tarnish their names and be barred from future employment as their names can be blacklisted.
This will cost only P40 million a month, or P480 million a year, but it could potentially generate the P300 billion in revenue losses at Customs, which can be channeled to productive impact projects for the poor. These young graduates can indeed change the customs of the people at the Bureau of Customs. Apart from actual physical inspection, they can cross-reference for differences in the export documents from other countries with our import manifests.
Don’t catch rebels, catch rain more? The Moro issue has been with us for centuries, while communist insurgency for many decades now, but social unrest is mainly caused by poverty
and injustice.
One major strategy is to build maybe 500,000 small dams, catch basins or small water-impounding projects (SWIPS) all over denuded mountain slopes. Rural folks can be tasked to help build these little dams and report on the terrorists in their midst.
This is far better than the Keynesian solution of merely hiring ditch diggers, and another batch to fill them up, just to generate false employment to perk up demand. Here we create productive jobs as these minidams can provide irrigation in the uplands, allow contour farming for agro-forestry, vegetables and high value crops, and develop upland fishponds.
These can potentially generate millions of jobs similar to what US President Franklin Roosevelt did when he created 4 million jobs in a month’s time at the height of the Great Depression in the 1930s, according to Nick Taylor’s book When FDR Put the Nation to Work.
E-mail: mikealunan@yahoo.com.