(Part 1)
Even during the early days of his campaign, candidate Digong was already a vocal proponent of changing our system of government from unitary to federal.
This was clearly the product of his many years at the helm of Davao, one of the world’s largest cities in terms of land area. But despite its size, it is simply too far away from “imperial Manila” to enjoy comparable largesse from the national government.
This inequity must have rankled the long-time mayor of Davao as well as many of his fellow politicians from the island of Mindanao, a region of vast but unrealized promise. It was they who came together over time to form the backbone of the federalist movement, coalesced in such political parties as PDP-Laban and the Centrist Democratic Party.
At one point, through the initiative of Cagayan de Oro’s Nene Pimentel, former Senate president and stalwart of the anti-dictatorship movement, the federalist forces enjoyed a breakthrough, with the passage in 1991 of the Local Government Code that sought to implement the local autonomy provisions of the 1987 Constitution.
But this breakthrough was short-lived and half-baked, as Pimentel will be the first to admit, and the federalist campaign has since resumed.
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In 2005, a 25-member constitutional commission appointed by President Arroyo drafted a new charter that, among other things, called for a federal form of government to be headed by a unicameral parliament. Unfortunately, this initiative was cut short by the “Hello Garci” hysteria whipped up by disgruntled deserters from her Cabinet.
Nonetheless, the draft still subsists today as a reference for present-day efforts to craft a new constitution. Good things, after all, are never wasted. Also available is a draft document from 1998 under the Estrada government, a couple of House and Senate resolutions, as well as what must now be a growing number of submittals to Congress, solicited or not.
It is this abundance of reference material that gives me hope that the writing of a new constitution by a constituent assembly will not take forever, regardless of what kind of congressmen we have today. The wheel need not be reinvented.
If a president in the mold of Duterte chooses to crack the whip on the congressmen (and senators) through his own appointive constitutional commission, we may well see a plebiscite on a new charter held as early as next year, 2018. This would just be in time for the May 2019 mid-term elections to convert into the first-ever free election of a new Philippine federal parliament.
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Soon after the President’s inauguration last June, I was asked to help convene a purely voluntary people’s initiative to educate the general public on “the federal idea.” Under the leadership of Raul Lambino (now PDP-Laban’s deputy secretary general for constitutional change), our group quickly dubbed itself the PDu30 Constitutional Reformers towards Federalism, or “PDu30 Core.”
As a member of the speakers bureau, I have since spoken at over a dozen occasions, mostly around Metro Manila, before gatherings as small as Rotary Club monthly fellowships, and as large as the annual convention of over 5,000 civil engineers in the cavernous auditorium of SMX Convention Center.
The question I’ve been most frequently asked is how many states we should have in a federal set-up. Fortunately, it is also the easiest one to answer.
The suggested number of states has ranged from the ridiculous (as many states as there are provinces or even sub-provinces and large cities), to the conventional (12-13 states broadly based on ethno-linguistic groupings, as proposed by former Senate President Pimentel), to the unconventional (only three states comprising the country’s three island/regions, as proposed by National Economic and Development Authority’s first head Dr. Gerry Sicat).
The Pimentel version works out to an average population of 12 to 13 million per state. This is well above the average of about 4.5 million per American state. Our states would clearly not be too small, even if we take account of the significant income and wealth disparities between the two countries.
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My own preference is a modification of Dr. Sicat’s version, to comprise half a dozen states: Northern/Central Luzon, Metro Manila-NCR, Southern Tagalog/Bicol, Visayas, Mindanao, and Bangsamoro. The arguments are primarily economic, not ethnic.
On size and population grounds, Luzon clearly needs to be broken up into at least two states, with a stronger region (central Luzon and southern Tagalog) carrying a weaker partner (northern Luzon and Bicol). NCR becomes our equivalent of Washington DC, New York, and Boston rolled into one mega-capital.
The Visayas are a string of islands that require all sorts of interconnecting infrastructure and utilities (power generation and distribution, feeder airports, inter-island bridges and RoRo). These are needed to sustain interconnected business models (e.g. tourism packages, agriculture to agri-processing) and are best planned and financed as one region.
The sheer contiguous size of Mindanao argues for ambitious, island-wide projects to jump-start its potential: from its own nuclear plant and power grid, to its own high-speed tollroads and railway system, to vast networks of corporate farms and attached agri-processors.
And of course an autonomous Bangsamoro state is our long-deferred response to our unhappy Muslim brethren. More optimistically, it also opens the door for the country to the banks and capital markets of Islamic finance south of our borders. (To continue on Friday)
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