Before I proceed with the main gist of this column today, let me congratulate University of San Carlos’ president, Pres. Dionisio M. Miranda, SVD, Prof. Frank Largo, Dr. Elizabeth Remedio, Dr. Cora Anzano, Dr. Connie Gultiano, Dr Frances Edillo, my fellow CDN columnist Prof. Perry Fajardo, Engr. Fortunato Sanchez and the entire retinue of writers and sections heads that produced “The Cebu Almanac 2016” which was launched last Monday at the Activity Center of Ayala Center Cebu. Ayala Center Cebu hosted the event together with the book’s publisher and my home base, the University of San Carlos Press.
A special exhibition of photographs with specific facts and figures selected from the 350-page full color book is still going on at the new wing of Ayala Center Cebu until March 20, right across Sperry Topsider. Copies of the thick almanac can also be had there for a discount. I would like to personally thank Ayala Center Cebu for once again hosting and co-sponsoring another successful launch and photo exhibition.
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Last week I began tracing the failures of the promises made during the four-day EDSA Revolution that toppled Ferdinand Marcos from the presidency after over 20 years in the helm, 14 of those as a well-entrenched dictator.
Today let us look at why for example presidential candidate Mar Roxas wants virtually everyone to run under the Liberal Party only to end up having to endorse one of two allies, for example, in Talisay City. Roxas’ problems are very much due to his personal choices as much as the system that our dear president, Cory Aquino, mother of our reigning president, put in place under the 1987 Constitution. That constitution is the root of the problem. First, it restored the pre-Martial Law executive-legislative set up that Marcos used as one of the reasons he introduced his own brand of a new society and created a dictatorship.
In short, because we hated what Marcos had done, we decided to go back to the old order on the legislative side, the pre-Martial Law bicameral system of legislature comprising a lower house of representatives, more than 200 of them, and an upper house of 24 senators not necessarily representing a geopolitical or geographic unit in the country.
Pres. Cory and her allies apparently wanted nothing to do with Marcos’ 1973 constitution which created a single chamber of deputies or legislators following the French (and to a certain extent the Singapore/Malaysian model). The only difference was, of course, that Marcos did not follow the federal system and only allowed a token opposition coming out of Central Visayas, the Pusyon Bisaya, which was too little to be of any impact in the legislature which was in the meantime renamed the Batasang Pambansa.
I still do not understand why Cory allowed this return, knowing that whether you liked it or not, Marcos correctly analyzed the inutility of a presidency that was beholden to a legislature without the recourse of dissolving it as in the parliamentary system if he as president, or in the case of the parliamentary system, as prime minister, could not get the right number of legislators to support his agenda. In short, we returned to a system of bribing legislators with all kinds of projects in order that they align with the presidential agenda. Worse, we lengthened the presidential term to six years where, if you get an inept and inutile president, is just too long.
Thus was born the Priority Development Assistance Fund or PDAF which, as has been shown graphically, was a powerful tool of the executive branch to the legislative that ended in the wrong hands and enriched many legislators, some of whom had to jump to the reigning party, the Liberal Party, in order to avoid getting into the cross-hairs of the Department of Justice.
The second problem that now ties the hands of Mar and the other presidential candidates is simple: there are just too many of them. This is because the 1987 constitution recognized a multi-party system and erased the two-arty system or what was then derided as the politics of the “ins” and the “outs.” Anyone can now build his or her own party and run for office, the more the merrier. And so today, we end up with locally–based political aggrupations (during the Spanish period they would be called barangays in the literal sense of coming from at least 30 related families) vying for national political parties to coalesce with them. The result is a myriad of alliances all predicated on machine politics or the capacity of the national political party to finance national candidates.
Like our pre-colonial skirmishes, many of us are grouped according to kin lines and vote according to regional identities, a ripe formula for a successful regional or even a district-based political party. This is the result of the flawed political system that we have. We all cry against political dynasties without realizing that it is the system that creates this via our own 1987 EDSA constitution.
The third problem is the return of the pre-Martial Law elite, what Marcos described as the greedy oligarchy that enriched themselves at the expense of the masses. Of course, Marcos replaced them with his cronies who did virtually the same. Given our hatred for these cronyism, why has the oligarchy returned? Let’s continue next week.
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