Compelling reasons

Jun Ledesma

THERE are only three compelling reasons imaginable why Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte owes it to his countrymen to run for President. It is not the one billion-purse that some businessmen are offering, not the throng of people that assembled in Luneta, and definitely not his friends and his family. The reasons are Grace Poe, Mar Roxas, and VP Jojo Binay.

As we get closer to Election 2016, the three cannot wait for the campaign period, and already are sniping at each perceived adversary. While in Butuan City campaigning, Grace Poe, for example,  singled out the Mayor Duterte’s proposal to shift the present unitary form of government to federal system, claiming it will perpetuate political dynasties. Obviously, the lady senator is out of sync with what is happening in the political arena. Right in her Senate turf are living examples of successional anomaly. She ignores or is simply ignorant of the fact that under the federal form of government, the current centralization of power will be shared by the regions or state. She has very little appreciation, or none at all, of equitable allocation of the nation’s wealth under a Federal government.

Grace has neither the intention to share the enormous power of the President nor has she the intention to allocate more than the morsels that Mindanao had been receiving under the centrist government. Then she insults the intelligence of the voters by what PDI columnist Amado Doronila describes as Poe’s messianic pretensions when she announced that her seeking the presidency was prompted by her desire to continue what her late father, FPJ, had started.

Of course, those are empty rhetoric aimed at blackmailing the electorate with emotional discourse. She knew quite well the weakness of Pinoy voters. When Ninoy Aquino died, even the more qualified Salvador “Doy” Laurel was sweettalked and deceived to give way to Cory, and she became President. When Cory died, Mar Roxas gave way to Noynoy and the latter won. When Fernando Poe Jr. died, the adoring nation voted her adopted daughter Grace senator, and no one ever bothered to seriously check on her citizenship because it was almost like mortal sin to do so. In fact, she topped the Senate race.

Still glowing under the wings of FPJ’s movie fans, she topped the presidential surveys, and then was imbued with an epic delusion of grandeur. She thinks that if she runs for President, Filipinos will forgive her for renouncing her Filipino citizenship and pledging allegiance to United States.

Roxas has been exhibiting the nature of a wimp. He cannot yet free himself from the umbilical cord of the President, even if he is a virtual lameduck. He follows the obstinacy of his idol not to apologize over how some libidinous members of the Liberal Party denigrate women. But what is more worrisome is his commitment to pursue the President’s abhorrent “daang matuwid” slogan which successfully brought the Philippines to the apogee of corruption unprecedented in past dispensations.

Mar, who was secretary of the Department of Transport and Communications, is actually part of the gargantuan problems besetting Metro Manila. He has not come up with even just a modicum of plan or solution on how to address the monstrous traffic and the mass railway transport systems deteriorated by sheer incompetence, and mismanagement.

Incredulous delays in issuance of drivers and car license plates the sluggishness is equaled only by the lethargic Internet speed. The ZTE broadband network would have effectively solved the problem if the Aquino administration and Roxas weren’t too pregnant with politics and pursued the program. It scrapped it completely along with the North Railway Transit project which could have solved the congestion in Naia.

The website of Roxas has a list of awards and recognition––still, these offer no assurance because the so-called citations do not translate to perceptible results. The victims of “Yolanda,” and the bombing of a residential district in Zamboanga City (to ferret out a few activist members of the MNLF) do not see these awards matched with the stark realities of miseries and chaos.

Factor in the Mamasapano tragedy and you have the apprehension that under an Aquino-tutored Roxas presidency the prospect of reenactment is not at all farfetched. And then more.

The abhorrence of Binay is best illustrated by the repugnance of many vice presidential prospects the Vice President had brazenly wooed to the point of nausea. As early as Day One after he was sworn in as VP, he presented himself as candidate for President in the 2016. But on Day Two, an avalanche of alleged corruption  issues and even imperious display of power  haunted him to this day and is not about to die down until the last day of the campaign… assuming he will survive the Ombudsman  cases.

Binay tried to parry some claiming lamely that the charges are mere political vendetta. His misfortune however is that he cannot possibly knock down the P2-billion parking building to do away with the evidence. He now assails the Aquino administration and the indifference of Roxas on the poor. But the classic irony is that he is part of this bungling government.

And so even as Duterte had made repeated declarations that he does not covet the presidency, it does not matter now if he changes his mind and accepts the challenge. He has to mount the hustings to prove the myopic Poe wrong when she brushed aside the value of Federalism to the regions outside the realm of Imperial Manila.

Duterte has to run because the protracted conflict in Mindanao can only be achieved under a federal system. He cannot consign us to yet another six years of presidency that will be a copycat of the Aquino administration.

Duterte cannot hide under the pretext of being sick, unqualified, and being poor because among the “presidentiables,” he is the most able-bodied, unquestionably qualified, and imbued with the strongest political will.

He need not prove anything because he has demonstrated it in pulsating realities which is Davao City under his term. Yes, he is correct when he says he is poor and in fact the poorest but he is the only one that, although undeclared, is being sought after and commitments from the poor and the rich now runneth over.

Duterte must now declare he is running, not around the beaches of Davao City but for the presidency. That will be the next gale from the south that will bring tumult of hopes to the nation.––Jun Ledesma, Davao City