"It does not look good."
"It does not look good."
Although President Duterte is not quite at the mid-point of his six-year term, it’s probably correct to say that he has already displayed everything that the Filipino people can expect from him as President and that he will spring no surprises during the remaining period of his presidency. Thus, it is possible to speak of the legacy of Mr. Duterte’s first two and a half years in office.
It is not a good legacy. Every one of the four major elements of the Duterte program of government—the four major things that he promised the Filipino people during the 2016 electoral campaign—has not been crowned with success. Those things were the eradication of the illegal drug problem, a shift to a truly independent foreign policy, a Golden Age of Infrastructure and the termination of the communist insurgency. Let’s examine them in turn.
First, Mr. Duterte’s war against illegal drugs. A few months after his assumption of the presidency, Rodrigo Duterte declared that he did not think he could solve the illegal-drugs problem within the six-month period that he promised during the electoral campaign. He said that he would need more time. In the meantime, thousands of Filipinos—around 6,000 according to the PNP (Philippine National Police), more than 20,000 according to domestic and international human-rights watchdogs—have lost their lives in relentless PNP forays into the nation’s poor neighborhoods. In the great majority of instances, the official explanation was that the gunned-down individuals resisted arrest.
In contrast, not a single drug lord has been tried and convicted. To make matters a whole lot worse, high officials of the PNP and the Bureau of Customs have been suspected of involvement in the smuggling of illegal drugs and in the recycling of confiscated illegal drugs.
Recently, an exasperated Rodrigo Duterte declared that the war on illegal drugs was unwinnable. Stung by criticism from Leni Robredo, he dared the Vice President to accept the position of co-chairperson of ICAD (Inter-Agency Committee Against Illegal Drugs). To his surprise, and the surprise of many others, Vice President Robredo accepted the presidential offer.
The shift to an independent foreign policy that Mr. Duterte promised in 2016 has proven to be not exactly that; it has proven to be a shift away from traditional allies—especially the US and the European Union—and toward traditional non-allies, namely China and Russia. From the start of his presidency, Mr. Duterte declared that his administration would at first be more interested in obtaining loans and investments from China than in enforcing the Philippines’ hard-won victory in the case it filed in the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) against China regarding China’s extravagant claim over the waters of the South China Sea.
Nearly halfway into his presidency, Mr. Duterte cannot claim great success in his administration’s quest for Chinese economic goodies. What he can be certain of is that he has not won the Filipino people’s support for his new foreign policy; a recent survey showed that 95 percent of Filipinos wants President Duterte to enforce the PCA judgment.
At the outset Mr. Duterte boasted that he could sweet-talk CPP-NDF chairman Jose Ma. Sison into agreeing to end one of the world’s longest-running communist insurgencies. After several negotiating sessions with the CPP-NDF leadership, the sweet talk turned to insults and threats of worse things to come. In recent months the military arm of CPP-NDF, the New People’s Army (NPA), has returned to its warlike ways, attacking government forces and inflicting damage on the nation’s rural economy. Another truce with the communists in the near future is unlikely; an end to their insurgency is an even dimmer prospect.
When it was first announced in 2016, the Duterte administration’s Build, Build, Build program—a program that would usher in a Golden Age of Infrastructure—was greeted with skepticism and disbelief in many knowledgeable quarters. Seventy-nine “flagship projects” costing P8 billion were regarded as too ambitious, too costly and too taxing for the Philippine economy’s absorptive capacity. The recent revelation that only nine of the 79 projects had been completed validated the doubts and fears regarding the Build, Build, Build program’s realism. It definitely looks like the Golden Age of Infrastructure’s time has not yet come.
This is the legacy of Rodrigo Duterte at the end of his first two and a half years in office. Barring a dramatic turnaround during the next three and half years of his term, it is likely to be the legacy of his entire presidency.