During his senior year at Manila’s San Beda College of law, Rodrigo Duterte was almost expelled because of a shooting incident. A classmate was bullying him, pinching his ears and his by now prominent nose. Irritated, the young probinsyano law student from Davao drew his gun from his waist and poked it at the face of the abusive rascal. Thinking Duterte was going to pull the trigger, a third classmate made a karate chop to avert disaster. But the gun went off anyway. The bully was wounded but only slightly.
Quickly, Duterte’s classmates retrieved the bullet and hid it, along with his gun. Apparently, in those freewheeling pre-martial law days, guns, licensed and unlicensed, flowed and were flouted freely and fearlessly in Manila campuses in what could be called the student council version of the Wild, Wild West. By September 1972, the strongman Ferdinand Marcos had put a stop to the nonsense. His martial law military and police collected more than 500,000 illegal firearms, three times the combined firepower of the national police and the armed forces.
Back to the Bedan bully. Shaken after the incident, he was told to go, disappear. San Beda’s monks heard about the incident and conducted a discreet but earnest investigation. The acting law dean, a Harvard-trained lawyer, wanted to expel the delinquent would-be lawyers. Duterte’s classmates used their nascent knowledge of the law, however. There was no bullet, no victim, no complainant. How could there be a crime?
Duterte went on to finish his law (Class 1972, though it is not clear whether he marched during his graduation, as a result of the shooting incident).
Attorney Duterte became a very successful state prosecutor, running after malcontents and criminal suspects. As a lawyer, he lived by one dictum—go by the evidence.
As Davao’s mayor of 22 years, however, he became known as The Punisher, for his swift and deadly approach towards criminals and suspects who just dropped dead without authorities looking for the evidence of guilt.
On June 30, 2016, lawyer Rodrigo Duterte will start his job as the 16th president of the Philippines. With more than 16.5 million votes, 39 percent of the total votes cast for president, he won with an overwhelming mandate. The 16.6 million votes is the largest in history for a presidential winner, and his getting 6.62 million votes than the ruling Liberal Party’s Manuel Araneta Roxas, is also the biggest winning margin ever.
Duterte’s massive mandate was an absolute rejection of the lackluster six-year reign of Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino III, whose dismal performance as president earned him the sobriquet “BS”—for bullsh*t.
More importantly, analysts, including this writer, see Duterte’s victory as a revolt of the masses, a change of government so revolutionary it will recast society so radically it will transform the nation for good hopefully forever.
The new President must grapple with the three main Cs that are cancer to society—criminality, corruption and cronyism.
The country is in the grip of criminals and criminal syndicates, particularly of drug lords. So entrenched are illegal drugs syndicates their leaders welcome being convicted and imprisoned at the National Penitentiary in suburban Muntinglupa south of the capital Manila. There, the drug lords are believed to operate three drug laboratories turning chemical precursors into highly valuable illegal drugs and prison guards and inmates into runners, drug couriers and their private bodyguards paid for by government.
In one of his press conferences, the incoming President vowed to lead an elite group of specially trained commandos to assault the Bilibid Prisons to flush out the drug lords and their henchmen and padlock the laboratories for good. “Anyone left standing will be shot dead,” Duterte declared. He thinks the drug lords and the labs exist with the tolerance of the Justice Department.
In succeeding statements, Duterte disclosed plans to conduct 50 public executions, by hanging, twice— “until the head is completely severed from the body”—of drug lords and other criminals.
He has quickly assembled an amazing “super majority” in both the House of Representatives and the Senate to enable him to rush an all-important death penalty bill. Capital punishment was declared illegal in 2006 by President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia routinely kill drug lords and drug couriers.
At the same time, Duterte has identified agencies which are supposed to be among the most corrupt in the bureaucracy. These include the Bureau of Customs, the Bureau of Internal Revenue, and the Land Transportation Office. Feeling hopeless, he has threatened to abolish these three if that is what it would take to stop their corruption. He has named military men to Customs and the LTO.
The next President has ordered all government bureaucrats to smile and to cut red tape to the minimum—five signatures and three days for most paperwork or permits, and five signatures and one month for top agencies like the cabinet-level National Economic and Development Authority.
As mayor, Duterte was wary of Neda. It made him do tedious paperwork, secure as many as 47 signatures and wait for three years only to be told that his plan for a railway in his native Davao had been rejected. So Neda is now forewarned.
Studies indicate as much as 40 percent of the national government budget is stolen or lost to corruption. The 2017 budget is a record P3.5 trillion. So P1,400 billion of that will be pocketed by government men who number three million. That P1.4 trillion is more money than what is allotted by government for social services (36.8 percent) and for economic services (29.7 percent), and is twice the amount needed by the country each year, P700 billion, to modernize its infrastructure and bring it to about 5 percent of GDP.
To curb corruption in government, Duterte will employ a balance of outright communists (the cadres and the elite of the Communist Party of the Philippines) and outright rightists (the police and military generals).
The last time a president employed such a volatile mix, during the administration of Corazon Cojuangco Aquino (mother of the outgoing president BS Aquino), she was hobbled by no less than seven coup attempts, two of which, the August 1986 and the December 1989, were the bloodiest in the country’s history.
The third C is cronyism. Studies by the prestigious The Economist of London showed that between 2014 and 2016, cronyism worsened in the Philippines.
That cronyism gave rise to the corrupt and incompetent administrators the nation’s mass transit railway system (its maintenance was monopolized by cabal from the ruling LP) and of the international airport (the general manager there is Aquino’s cousin).
Now, who will jail or shoot these people? The evidence is there.
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