Forty-five days before being sworn in as the 16th president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Roa Duterte (RRD) seems to have hit the ground running.
President-elect Rody has named his key cabinet members, lined up the next leaders of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police (PNP), and offered power sharing with the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP, which by the way, is no longer outlawed) with four crucial cabinet departments—Agrarian Reform (DAR), Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), Labor (DoLE), and Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).
These departments impact on the landowning class (Hacienda Luisita will be cut up finally and the CPP can enforce it with its New People’s Army regulars numbering from 6,000 to 9,000), on the oligarchy (the biggest employers and owners of the country’s biggest enterprises), and on the poor (the DSWD dispenses P60 billion in cash to the poor yearly).
DAR is agrarian or land which means agriculture and agriculture is where majority of the workforce is and harbors the poorest Filipinos (the farmers and fishermen). Thanks to corruption and inadequate infra, agriculture is the poorest performing sector of the economy. That’s why hunger is rampant and since food is 55 percent of the poor’s budget, it is why we have had severe and growing poverty.
DENR means mining and (environmental) clearances for major business projects. With its permits system, corruption is the norm and there is so much mining, including by the Chinese, that is illegal. DENR can spell the difference between a power shortage and a power surplus (thanks to delayed or prompt clearances and energy development contracts). And energy is 20 percent of production cost.
Labor is 15 percent of production cost. The communists will handle that, too. You will hear a crescendo of demands for no “endo” (end of contracts or workers rotated every five months), higher wages, unionized workers, guaranteed employment, and profit and management sharing. There could be restiveness on the labor front as the oligarchy will of course resist such demands.
So the communists will intervene in 35 percent of production costs (energy plus labor). A third, or 32 percent, are taxes. Digong says he will lower taxes for the low income and increase those of the high income, again the oligarchs (he probably means the rich must pay more in taxes and avoid tax avoidance). Thankfully, the level-headed and sensible management wizard Carlos “Sonny” Dominguez, probably the next Finance chief, could balance things out.
I hope you won’t see a deja vu of the Cory Aquino-era (1986-1992) internecine infighting between the right represented by Finance Secretary Jaime Ongpin and the left represented by Executive Secretary Joker Arroyo and Labor Secretary Bobbit Sanchez. It created a power vacuum that triggered seven coup attempts against Cory and the suicide of Ongpin.
Meanwhile, President Digong will ban many things—smoking in public places, drinking outside homes and outside allowable hours, drunken driving, speeding along the main metropolitan highway Edsa (violators will be stripped naked in front of media), and minors loitering at wee hours (their parents will be arrested by the police).
Also banned are red tape and discourtesy in government (bureaucrats must smile always and should at least buy a cheap set of a false teeth, if need be). If bureaucrats cannot cut red tape or be courteous, they have to resign and be replaced by the teeming jobless outside their offices. Scalawags in the police and the military must now resign, prepare for combat duty, and join Commander-in-Chief Duterte to invade Jolo to flush out the notorious Abu Sayyaf Group which has converted Mindanao and parts of Palawan into a mini-Somalia. If these scalawags are captured by the ASG, they must say their “Our Fathers” because the CIC won’t pay ransom.
Applicants for overseas work and passports need no longer commute from one government agency to another and need not comply with tedious and time-consuming bureaucratic requirements. Police and NBI clearances will be issued, on the spot, at the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Drug lords and criminals of the heinous type will be pursued and shot to death if they resist arrest or try to escape. A senior Davao police officer will lead an elite task force for this deadly crusade.
On the political front, Duterte’s PDP-Laban party has entered into a functional merger with tycoon Manny Villar’s Nacionalista Party, possibly to wrest control of the presidency of the 24-man Senate from the Liberal Party and help form a coalition to grab the speakership from the stranglehold of the Liberal Party in the House of Representatives.
Duterte is aware many of his edicts will be controversial if not illegal. So he has surrounded himself with lawyers, brilliant lawyers.
Bar topnotcher and Harvard-trained Gilberto Teodoro has been invited as Defense chief probably to ask for more substantial “excess defense articles” (a euphemism for second-hand war materiel) from the United States.
Two lawyers, Perfecto Yasay and Alan Peter Cayetano, will invade Foreign Affairs to check on the arbitration case filed by Manila against China regarding the West Philippine Sea, the Scarborough Shoal land-grabbing, and international trade or partnership deals to which Digong is not warm. Veteran San Beda-trained lawyer Salvador Medialdea is executive secretary to winnow the paperwork and contracts sent to the Executive Office. Lawyers Jesus Dureza (No. 10 in the 1973 bar) and Bebot Bello will negotiate with the Muslim separatists and the communist rebels.
On the vice presidential race, people have asked me: Was Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos (BBM) Jr. cheated? Consider three things: in the SWS exit poll (exit polls are usually very accurate), BBM won by 1.8 percentage points over Leni Robredo and 1.8 is about 720,000 votes based on 40 million votes cast for president; two, BBM clobbered Leni two-to-one among overseas voters; and three, Marcos has been a political brand for half a century. Can it be beaten by a political brand of barely three months? Imagine Coke, Tide or Colgate upstaged by an unknown brand of three months.
In marketing, it cannot happen. I don’t know in Aquino-brand politics.
biznewsasia@gmail.com