Butch Bagabuyo “Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible will make violent revolutions inevitable.” – President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) IN his inaugural address in 1861, President Abraham Lincoln of the USA warned in plain and simple language, thus: “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people, who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.” As PNoy and his Liberal Party magicians if not, manipulators, are doing their worst, it is high time, we reminded them of that great American President’s stern warning to his political party’s bigwigs that their country belongs to their own people, and not to those in power. Because we, Mindanaoans, have been abused and left behind by Imperial Manila and the filthy rich for the last half a century, nay, 70 long and excruciating years since the establishment of democracy under the tutelage of the Americans, we are demanding, if only to avert People Power on May 9, 2016,  the following inalienable rights:
  • Instead of insisting and funding the clearly unconstitutional BBL, represented by the conjoined twins MILF-BIFF that heinously murdered the 44 brave SAF commandos, PNoy and Congress should pronto ensure the holding of a Constitutional Convention simultaneously with the May 9, 2016 elections. Without a doubt, the 1987 Constitution needed from the very beginning an immediate overhaul; it was drafted by a chosen few elite and not by the working people. Further, the Cory Constitution is a reactionary form of a fundamental law, and neither time nor cost are enough reasons to fool the poor ad infinitum.
  • Everybody knows that our ship of state has sailed through turbulent seas spawned by debilitating greed of those in power at the expense of the poor, especially Mindanaoans; and,
  • Now that Mindanaoans have had enough and are demanding to stop our government’s blatant rape of Mindanao’s natural resources, the glaring and unconscionable neglect to improve the lives of the millions who live in abject poverty, the unabated graft and corruption and the continuing reign of the culture of impunity, PNoy and his Liberal Party are doing their worst by applying squid tactics, thus putting our candidate, Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, for a clearly minor procedural lapse, in the same disqualification case with their alternate candidate who, by her own admission, is a foundling and therefore not a natural born Filipino as specifically defined in the Constitution.
  • Undoubtedly, the voluntary inhibition by the three learned and constitutional law experts Supreme Court justices in the disqualification cases of PNoy’s alternate candidate for the May 9, 2016 elections and the shocking appearance of the Solicitor General as counsel for the Senate Electoral Tribunal (SET) kuno (read that as lawyering for PNoy’s alternate candidate for President instead of the people of the Philippines are too glaring and not unlike the impeachment and conviction of former Supreme Court Justice Corona).
  • Reform pronto the Comelec by filing administrative cases against the few scalawags (the good and hard-working personnel in the Comelec are the greatest in number), and suspend them for the duration of the 2016 elections to ensure that the abuses that they have perpetrated by operating the digital “dagdag-bawas” known as the PCOS and the surreptitiously invented and inserted 90,000 OMR (aka Oplan Mar Roxas), and the Comelec must, without fail, resolve all pending election cases since 2013 national and local elections and failing, they should be impeached pronto.
  • Further, refusal or failure on the part of Comelec to comply pronto the above-stated demands shall certainly ignite a transfer of power from its representatives, both elected and the unelected, to the sovereign, not unlike the People Power of 1986.
  • Revamp the Office of the Ombudsman by ensuring that all pending cases for or against public officials and their conspirators who are running for any elective positions in the coming 2016 elections must all be resolved before the start of the campaign period on Feb. 9, 2016, and no excuses for not resolving the same should be accepted.
  • The concerned citizens/non-government organizations should file cases and demand that the Supreme Court issue a TRO/SQA to suspend all ongoing public works project and all other projects involving public funds for the duration of the national and local elections only, and the Supreme Court should likewise immediately issue the TRO/SQA just like what it they did in the disqualification case of the administration’s alternate candidate, who is a foundling. Otherwise, this government is inviting the warning of a well-loved US President Kennedy and ensuring the happening of the inevitable. In the words of Aristotle: “Revolutions are not about trifles, but spring from trifles.”
Tsada, di ba!