In the last few days, the crescendo hit us with unexpected wallop, coming as it does just about 19 months since the political resurrection of the Marcos brand
Senadora Imelda Josefa Marcos y Romualdez, popularly nicknamed Imee, said it best, when she described the latest chapter in our never-ending toxic politics as “nakakaloka.”
For that is what it is.
In the last few days, the crescendo hit us with unexpected wallop, coming as it does just about 19 months since the political resurrection of the Marcos brand.
What seemed like a simmering cold war that began with the demotion of a former president from her ceremonial perch in the HoR and a diatribe of “tambaloslos” has now become not just a battle of brands, but an irreconcilable War of the Families.
And battleground is not the South China Sea or the West Philippine Sea as we refer to our part of it, but a necessary Constitutional provision that allows us, the sovereign people, via our elected legislators, or elected convention delegates, and an ill-defined notion called “people’s initiative” to revise a 37-year old Charter that I keep describing as “confused and confusing.”
Several attempts in several administrations have preceded this attempt to revise a Constitution hammered out in haste by appointees of a “revolutionary” president who instead of reforming governance with her initially dictatorial but popularly supported power, wittingly or unwittingly brought back an ancient regime of traditional politics peopled by recycled dynasts and a new set of oligarchs.
And with the political framework provided by what is now called the Cory Constitution which replaced the Marcos “siopao” Constitution, the state of the nation has just become progressively worse.
From the point of view of economics, we have descended from being Numero Dos in Asia, second only to a rehabilitated Japan to Numero Siete, behind Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam, and by next year even behind Cambodia as Numero Ocho in that 10-country grouping founded by our president Macapagal and inaugurated by our president Marcos Sr. called the Asean.
(Editor’s Note: Asean was established on Aug. 8, 1967 in Bangkok, Thailand, with the signing of the Asean Declaration (Bangkok Declaration) by the Founding Fathers (foreign ministers) from Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.
(The five Foreign Ministers who signed it – Adam Malik of Indonesia, Narciso R. Ramos of the Philippines, Tun Abdul Razak of Malaysia, S. Rajaratnam of Singapore, and Thanat Khoman of Thailand – would subsequently be hailed as the Founding Fathers of probably the most successful inter-governmental organization in the developing world today. And the document that they signed would be known as the Asean Declaration.
(Asean replaced the Association of South East Asia (ASA), which had been formed by the Philippines, Thailand, and the Federation of Malaya (now part of Malaysia) in 1961.
(Two years later, Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia – MAPHILINDO – was formed in Manila by virtue of an eponymous declaration signed in 1963 by Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman of the Federation of Malaya, President Diosdado Macapagal of the Republic of the Philippines and President Sukarno of the Republic of Indonesia. )
Symbolically, our president just left Vietnam, ravaged by a series of wars against the French colonialists, and then a mighty US-interfered civil war against each other, to witness the signing of a 5-year rice supply import agreement with a country whose farmers and agricultural students studied at the once-legendary Los Banos branch of our state university.
Additionally, our president comes home with a promise from Vietnam’s Vingroup that they are looking at our country as locus of an EV-battery factory, using rare earth metals mined in Vietnam, while they sell us their VinFast cars and vehicles, adding more “competition” to almost all sorts of foreign vehicle brands that clog the thoroughfares of our “worst traffic in the world” nightmare.
Did our president recall during the signing ceremonies that once upon a forgotten time, his father inaugurated a Ford-backed progressive car manufacturing program start-up in Mariveles, Bataan, long before Malaysia came up with its Proton and Thailand became the region’s manufacturing facility for all sorts of Japanese brands, and before South Korea’s Hyundai, Kia and Daihatsu?
Still, the reason adduced by our leaders to amend the economic provisions of our legal Charter is to invite more foreign direct investments, so that they will perhaps be able to justify the globe-trotting of our peripatetic president, soon revisiting his favorite Singapore and later Germany, beside Switzerland, Luxembourg and Lichtenstein, the havens of the hidden wealth of potentates and billionaires.
Arguably, the nation he last visited is one where all property still belongs to the State, and foreigners are mere lessors to the land where, for the past 15 years, they have been heavily investing 10, even more times, than they have been bringing their precious “FDIs” into our ‘friendly’ shores.
Not economic restrictions which we have been continually easing, but our unstable policies that flip and flop with every change of government in our politics-crazy country, is the real reason why these much-needed foreign investors come to say “hello” and the day after, “goodbye.”
Still, our president assures us that “Uniteam is not just one party of two or three parties…but the unification of all political, hopefully all political forces in the Philippines to come together for the good of the country.”
Good luck to that, now that the dynastic progenitors who welded in the last days of 2021 the Solid North with the now Solid South have unsheathed their swords from their scabbards.
Truly toxic. Truly “nakakaloka.”
What a country!