President Rodrigo Duterte on Monday admitted the public had not yet embraced federalism, one of his campaign promises, adding leaving this to local officials was dangerous because it might be influenced by illegal drugs.
“I do not believe that the Filipino people have really embraced what federalism is. It will be a good setup someday, but today when we are all in a quandary of (sic) how to solve even the smallest [problems],” Duterte said in his speech, addressing new public officials in Malacañang.
“Federalism is good, but if you leave it to just to the local governments to do it, dangerous for drugs,” he added.
His remarks came after the death of former Senate President Aquilino “Nene” Pimentel Jr., a known advocate of a federal system of government.
Duterte has made federalism one of his major campaign promises in 2016, claiming it would break the power centralization in Metro Manila and put an end to armed conflict in Mindanao.
In 2018, he ordered the creation of the 22-man consultative committee which drafted a proposed Federal Charter but it failed to gain support from lawmakers in the 17th Congress.
In a survey last year by the Social Weather Stations, only 37 percent of Filipinos support the shift to a federal system of government while only one out of four Filipinos are aware of what it is.
Early this year, Duterte scrapped the idea to change the country’s current system of government, and he has since then pushed for charter change.
A government inter-agency task force has been campaigning at the present for “surgical amendments,” without necessarily abandoning the proposed federalism that would require an overhaul of the 1987 Constitution.