“Heaven, it seems, has allowed us to elect leaders whose mandate it will soon deny”
Rodrigo Roa Duterte turned 81 years old last Saturday, March 28.
He could not celebrate the milestone in the company of his loved ones, as he is an occupant of a cell in Scheveningen, courtesy of Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr., who rendered him to that foreign court in Den Haag, called the International Criminal Court.
That international tribunal, formed by the Rome Statute, has lost credibility among many in the community of nations, having become nothing but an expensively-maintained tool capable of prosecuting only the leaders of Third World nations accused of “crimes against humanity” which supposedly shock the sensibilities of the “civilized” countries of the First World.
It has issued warrants for the arrest of Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu for the victims of their war against Ukraine and Palestine respectively, but are incapable of effecting their jurisdiction, because neither those countries nor others have paid attention to the ICC’s warrants, that is, until the incumbent Philippine president gave it his gift of Duterte, the first Asian leader as its trophy.
Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. insulted our own functioning judicial system when he colluded with the ICC in the hope of getting rid of a popular leader he could not for the life of him ever match in public esteem.
Earlier, his minions in the House of Representa-thieves held investigations in aid of publicized inquisition against Duterte and the daughter whose collaboration with BbM in 2022 sealed his electoral victory.
By acquiescing to be BbM’s running-mate in 2022, she delivered the legion of loyalists of her popular father to the candidate she wrongly trusted.
Our annus horribilis started on Feb. 5 when 216 congressmen, promised barrels of dirty pork, hastily signed articles of impeachment they had not even read, all in half a day’s work, for transmittal to a Senate court which was about to recess.
Feeling giddy about an impeachment he feigned not to support, BbM segued into ordering the “kidnap” of Inday Sara’s father, in an operation which, as it turns out, was hatched earlier, with ICC investigators given red carpet treatment by a Janus-faced government which officially and piously maintained that it would never allow a Filipino to be tried by that foreign court.
That inglorious March 12, 2025 feat, gripping drama of which was caught on snippets that went viral, sealed the fate of BbM’s Alyansa senatorial slate, composed of instant recruits and balimbings who did not support him just three years back.
The backlash over railroaded impeachment followed by stab-in-the-back shanghai to Den Haag caused the electoral humiliation of Alyansa’s all-star cast by Duterte’s largely unknown candidates.
To arrest the limping BbM as he was to address the nation on the opening of the 20th Congress, his spinmasters, three of which are foreigners paid in dollars and euros, tried to turn the tables on the 19th Congress via a soundbyte — “Mahiya naman kayo”.
Without thinking of end game repercussions, glossing over the reality that the president and his family had their hands on the infrastructure mess mismo, that headline soon began to haunt this government, as layers and layers of unimaginable corruption began to peel off.
Disquiet reigned over the land for the past 14 months, with never a dull moment on the political front, until BbM’s American idols decided to unleash the last gasps of a dying empire upon a recalcitrant Iran without concern for cost, miscalculating the enemy’s resolve, its global economic impact, with the worst possible effects on import-dependent and fiscal-deficit countries like our benighted Philippines.
So we find ourselves in the worst of times, and while the Chinese have the same written character for crisis and opportunity, hardly any opportunity is likely to be squeezed by our government from the present situation.
The rest of this year can only bring portents of further crisis, whether political or economic, with tremendous, perhaps insufferable, social and existential costs.
What was it the ancient Chinese said when calamities in the form of earthquakes, pestilence and famine vested upon their nation?
“The emperor has lost the mandate of heaven.”
We live in a flawed democracy, where most of those we elect have thrived in manipulating the forms of democracy, where media is often co-opted by the corrupt, resulting in the denial of democratic substance, which is equal opportunity for the common tao.
Heaven, it seems, has allowed us to elect leaders whose mandate it will soon deny.
