The things that President-elect Rodrigo Duterte and his spokespersons were declaring, asserting and proclaiming to the nation during the last three weeks have sent me scurrying to Webster’s Dictionary to remind myself of the meaning of ‘minority’ and the significance of being in a minority. And because the word ‘minority’ has a particular application in the corporate world, I consulted my law-school textbook on private corporations.
It turned out that I really didn’t have to go to the dictionary and my law book, because they merely confirmed—as I thought they would—what I had known all along. Given a total of 100, the majority is any number in excess of 50 and the minority is the smaller number. The minority can be made up of more than one number, but the majority must be higher than 50.
My re-reading of the textbook on private corporations likewise confirmed what I already knew, viz., that a majority is any number greater than 50 percent out of 100 percent and that in order to be able to control a corporation, a stockholder must own voting shares representing at least 50 percent of the total outstanding voting shares. This explains why 50 is the magic number in corporate governance; a stockholder deserving to control a corporation must own at least that percentage of the total of outstanding voting shares. In the governance of corporations this rule—50 percent or more controls—is applied strictly.
Thus, there would seem to be a glaring variation between the application of the words ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ in the corporate setting and their application to the situation that this country is facing in the post-2016-election milieu. In the corporate setting a stockholder cannot exercise control over a corporation unless he (or it) owns at least 50 percent of the corporation’s outstanding shares; having less than 50 percent makes a stockholder a minority stockholder and therefore incapable of controlling the corporation.
That, it appears, is not the case with the administration of this country. The formal turnover of governmental power from the Aquino administration to the group of President-elect Duterte has yet to take place—that will take place on June 30—but already the latter is declaring, announcing and proclaiming the policies that will govern this country during the period up to June 30, 2022, some of which are highly controversial.
The people of this country, even those who did not vote for him, have no problem with Rodrigo Duterte and his supporters behaving like a government-in-waiting long before June 30; after all, in the absence of an Election Code provision on a run-off election, the Davao City mayor is effectively the nation’s next President and his group is the incoming administration. He may be a minority President, but he is the minority President-elect.
What they have a problem with is the fact that Rodrigo Duterte and Co. are behaving like the majority stockholders of the corporation known as the Philippine Duterte did not win a majority in the election: nearly two out of every three Filipinos (62 percent) did not vote for (read: rejected) him. Nor can he be said to have won by a landslide, for he only gathered close to 17 million votes out of 41 million votes cast.
Being a minority President-elect, Rodrigo Duterte should behave the way a minority behaves. He should not be announcing, declaring and proclaiming, the way a majority President-elect does, national policies on such highly deeply-felt and contentious matters as CCP-NDF-NPA inclusion in the Cabinet, the giving of a hero’s burial to former President Ferdinand E. Marcos (the martial-law strongman of 1972-1986), the restoration of the death penalty and extrajudicial punishment of drug-trade participants.
The voters who cast their ballots for Mar Roxas, Miriam Defensor-Santiago, Grace Poe and Jejomar Binay—all 23 million of them—very probably do not want Rodrigo Duterte to behave as though he won more than 50 percent of the total votes cast in the recent election. Rodrigo Duterte is a minority President. They don’t want him to behave like a majority President.
E-mail: rudyromero777@yahoo.com
