President Duterte, as commander in chief of the Armed Forces, declared that he was assuming responsibility for the alleged misencounter between the police and the military in Samar. He said that if it was found during the investigation that the military was at fault, they would not go scot-free.
Santa Banana, that would be unfair for the six dead and the nine injured cops. From the looks of it, they never stood a chance.
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We are now on the third year of the Duterte administration, there are many questions that beg for answers. Foremost, the President promised us change. We thought that change would be a country without illegal drugs.
The President also told us that he would conduct a war against criminality and against corruption in government. Has he succeeded so far in the past two years?
I confess that I was never a fan of the President. But that does not make me a rabid critic. I am on record as a columnist who praises Mr. Duterte when I think he is doing well, and criticizes him when he is not.
This is why I believe that while he has enough political will to deliver the change he promised us, those ills will continue until the end of his term in 2022.
For the campaign against drugs, the President committed the big mistake of framing it just as a peace and order problem. This is why the killings have been prevalent.
In my years of working with a drug rehabilitation center, DARE Foundation, I have known that drug abuse afflicts both the rich and the poor. The rich go into it for the experience and the kicks. The poor are in it because they want to forget their poverty. The need for money also drives the poor to become pushers.
DARE Foundation considered the drug menace as a health problem. A drug user must be rehabilitated —otherwise, demand for drugs will persist.
It is still happening now—the demand is so great and not only from the poor, but rich and poor alike.
Alas, the Duterte administration is focused on the poor, as shown in statistics. I say that the President has made the big mistake in trying to terminate everybody involved in illegal drugs. It’s also a poverty issue because we see young boys smelling solvents just to mitigate their hunger.
This is a war that cannot be won because the root cause is poverty.
The President has to realize that drugs are also a problem in other countries, but they do not go about killing everybody involved.
I have covered 10 presidents in almost seven decades. Nobody among them has been able to eradicate drugs or corruption.
For as long as human nature is what it is, greed for money will always be there. I recall that during the Macapagal administration when corruption as Customs was so bad, Customs officials were replaced by cadets from the Philippine Military Academy who were supposedly picked because of their idealism. Soon enough, they were also corrupted.
Initially, President Duterte was doing well when he fired his classmates and fraternity brothers at San Beda for having a whiff of corruption about them. But then he started recycling these friends, appointing them to other agencies.
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To be fair, despite the President’s failure to deliver the change we have been hoping for, the economy has been doing well. For this I give him credit for having economic managers like Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez, Trade and Industry Secretary Ramon Lopez, and Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno.
The ambitions Build Build Build program may have initially given problems to the poor because of tax reforms, but in the long run, TRAIN will benefit the country.
As for foreign policy, his policy of accommodation, appeasement and acquiescence to the Chinese must be stopped.
On peace and order, his on-again, off-again peace talks with the Communists is to be expected. As I have been saying, you cannot trust the communists to talk peace. There cannot be any ceasefire, and moreover an agreement, because what the communists want is for the government to give in to all their demands.
I can only point to one thing where the administration has succeeded—the war on terrorism. He imposed martial law in Mindanao.
I am not even giving him a score. I am disappointed by the latest Social Weather Stations survey showing that people’s trust and acceptance of him remain “very good.” They are either stupid or they refuse to acknowledge what is going on.
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