So we’ve heard the last State-of-the-Nation Address. I shall not join the parade of commentators. I have chosen instead to write about an exciting new challenge –that which the erudite Reynato S. Puno, retired chief magistrate of the land, tossed upon the present leadership (though best addressed to the immediate future).
Last Wednesday, July 22, a new movement was born, that of “Bagong Sistema, Bagong Pag-Asa,” which champions system change more than just a cosmetic leadership change. It goes for the substantive, rather than the tawdry routine of choosing a leader on which once more and once again, the Filipino people pin their hopes for the future.
CJ Puno in his speech, one of the best I have heard in a lifetime, citing the metamorphosis of governance throughout world history, tells us that “the key to the success of man’s search for progress, first as individuals and then as a collectivity, is their success at being able to deal with their diversities. And they failed when they did not allow diversity to flourish, when they tried to impose uniformity on the minority, when they tried to eradicate their difference dictated by the distinctness of their ethnicity.”
Thus he, along with former Sen. Nene Pimentel, former UP President Pepe Abueva, and former Budget Secretary Jun Enriquez and the new movement Bagong Sistema, Bagong Pag-Asa, advocate the shift from the present highly centralized, unitary-presidential form of government to a federal-parliamentary form. They call for the re-writing of the present 1987 Constitution which was forged by an appointive commission during the immediate post-Marcos years, this time by an elected constitutional convention.
The chief enumerated six major reasons for the proposed system change, the last being a fitting and lasting solution to the mess of a proposal engineered by the present administration in attempting to solve the age-old problem of secession in Muslim Mindanao. “Let us castrate the thought that we know best how to govern them, when our relationship with them goes no deeper than the handshake level. We must disabuse our mind with the discarded idea that the sovereignty of a state is absolute, indestructible and indivisible, and hence cannot be shared with people and with aggregates of people. Federalism has exploded the myth that people with distinct identities cannot be trusted the right to rule themselves…(it) offers the best hope to our distinct minorities to be allowed self-rule.”
In fine, Bagong Sistema says with no equivocation, that the Bangsamoro Basic Law as proposed to Congress will not pass the test of constitutionality, if the legal framework is the present. But because that same Constitution, which has been our legal framework for an entire generation of Filipinos, has clearly not worked to our lasting benefit, both as individuals and as a society, it is time to change the system itself. And thus solve the problem that the Christian majority is continually beset with in its relationship not only with our Muslim minority, but other ethno-linguistic and culturally distinct parts of the Filipino community as well.
The output of the “summit for change” embodied in a declaration entitled “Securing the Country’s Future” states that “if we continue with business as usual, we may regress from a fragile to a failed state…that these problems cannot be solved by simply once again exercising our right to vote in 2016 so that we can change some of our leaders in government and keep most of them.”
“We are convinced that we must put an end to this political insanity of doing the same every three years and praying that the results will be different — that the ones we choose will do better than their predecessors, and government will be a little more honest, a little more efficient, and our lives will be a little better.”
Incremental progress has ruled our lives for far too long. It is time to take bold steps forward. It is never enough that GDP grows yet only too few prosper while far too many are left behind. Something has got to give in a system that allows such incremental growth to keep the poor in perpetual bondage.
The declaration sums it up by calling for a “change in our political system so that we can make it truly representative, accountable, responsive and responsible, and enable us to attain full nationhood.”
Amen to that.
But I realistically do not believe that its dispositive portion, where Bagong Sistema calls on “Congress and the President to gather their collective political resolve and singleness of purpose (more desiderata than possibility given our experience of the past 30 years) and clear the way for system change by convening a Constitutional Convention to examine and propose revisions to the 1987 Constitution,” can be achieved within the short lifespan of the Aquino government.
It is not only because President Aquino will pay little if any attention to Bagong Sistema, despite the sincerity and nationalism that propelled its being, but because time has run out, even by the mental and emotional timelines of the public.
The best that we can hope for is that a new leader who should emerge from the chaos of the next sovereign exercise of the public will (is that oxymoronic? I still hope not.) in May 2016, will embrace the call of Bagong Sistema, Bagong Pag-Asa, for genuine system change – junking the present highly centralized and unitary system which has kept the nation and the diverse tribes that compose it from reaching the fullness of their potential for betterment, if not greatness.