President Rodrigo Duterte said he wants a bigger statue of Filipino hero Lapulapu in Cebu than colonizer Ferdinand Magellan.
In his public address, the Chief Executive said he is uncomfortable to see the statue of the native chieftain who killed the foreign colonizer smaller than the latter.
“I am not belittling Magellan…I do not mean to offend the sensibility of Cebuanos. I’m just a citizen of this country expressing my opinion. When I was campaigning for the presidency, I went to Cebu and there was this statue of Magellan and Lapulapu. Magellan’s statue is bigger than Lapulapu. I don’t know about the Cebuanos, but I am very uncomfortable to say that the statue of Lapulapu is smaller than Magellan,” Duterte said.
Duterte wanted to ensure at the tail end of his term, it’s for Philippine hero Lapulapu to be the more revered figure locally especially when compared to Magella, who was a Portuguese.
The statue of Lapulapu and Magellan Shrine are situated a short distance from each other, where the historic Battle of Mactan was believed to have taken place in 1521.
He asked Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles to contact the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) so it may “look into the situation”.
“Note it there, Karlo. Somebody from the Historical Commission, you just tell them that the president has requested you to go there and try to look at the situation without offending the inhabitants there,” the chief executive said.
Nograles said a bigger statute of Lapulapu was already unveiled.
But Duterte didn’t seem satisfied with this and still wanted the NHCP to give Lapulapu a “higher honor.”
“As a matter of principle, I do not want that our national hero number one, who fought the invaders–Magellan, whose statue now is higher than the statue of Lapulapu. The thing is, I want Lapulapu bigger and higher than Magellan. What matters is the reverence that we should be giving to Lapulapu,” he added