Tomorrow it will be a year since Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte was sworn into the presidency.
There will be—if there are not already—countless analyses of the positive and negative aspects of the one-year-old administration. This maverick local politician, who ran and won on the promise of change, has certainly made life interesting for Filipinos here and abroad. He has also given the international community a lot to talk about, even if it is only about his speech patterns, demeanor, or no-apologies wisecracks about women.
But all these bits become nearly superficial when viewed against the deeply rooted, longer-impact problems that the administration must confront in the next five years.
Poverty lies at the root of our struggles. Despite the nominally stable economic growth, inequality persists. Poverty, and the desperation it brings, makes people vulnerable to disaster, substance abuse, a life of crime, and the lure of insurgency, even terrorism.
We trust that the economic team of the Duterte administration is working quietly and defying all odds to get infrastructure built swiftly and sustainably. Only this can ensure that growth is consistent and more evenly distributed. We can’t make any conclusions as to their success today, because it is precisely the nature of these plans to take long to materialize. Long, but not longer than they should.
The next five years are difficult to foresee. It will be a mix of external events about which we are powerless, and internal decisions made by the officials we elected and those they appointed.
Perhaps the best commitment the President can make on his one-year anniversary tomorrow is to free us from ambivalence and uncertainty. Before he utters something, he better have thought about it hard so that his spokesmen do not scramble approximating what he meant, or do damage control, or tell us to be more creative in interpreting his words.
We do not need to spend precious energy figuring out whether our leader means what he says, or will even show up at all. Those who set out to sow confusion and chaos will have less ammunition. And then we can actually begin to build a nation instead of just putting out fires.