Can Duterte change the fate of the Filipinos?

I always believe that when a leader wants to get things done and he puts his heart and soul into it, he will, in time. However, he must also develop qualities to support and strengthen his might so that the people will work with him in achieving his goals. It will entail a lot of sacrifices on his part including his personal life – time, comfort, friendship, and happiness. But at the end of the day, a feeling of incomparable joy and fulfilment will be revealed and a lasting legacy shall be left behind to a nation.

For centuries, the Filipinos have been conditioned to be oppressed. Not just by foreigners but also by our very own people: public officials, oligarchs, monopolies and spoils of both private or public office.

The landowner, the business manager, the house owner abuse their workers and government is too weak and even numb to extend a helping hand to protect the victims from the clear as daylight exploitations. The barangay captain works on conditional terms. He will not give a business permit to spite the small business owner who needs to make money for a living. The mayor will lock up the door of a storekeeper just because he did not hire his godchild. He will even spike real estate taxes to more than 200 percent. He can create more fees and permits to empty the pockets of the citizens without anyone opposing him. A construction firm cannot get a contract to build roadways just because he does not give a commission to the congressman. The president will say what he wants even if he is coarse and unrefined. Sanamagan! What a country.

Over the years these public officials’ masochistic, corrupt ways and padrino system has gone from worse to worst. We thought for a while that Marcos was the icon of all evils. Look around you now. Many public officials have morphed into stronger and wiser versions of Marcos. This includes the barangay captain and his councilmen who have made an industry in politics for vested interests.

How can we stop oppression and save the oppressed? How did this trait become part of our character as a people? My good friend Nelson Navarro, a veteran writer and biographer in his speech at the 59th Philippine PEN National Conference in November last year traces this phenomenon.

Who really owns and controls this country, its resources and its future? That is the burning question. I have always thought that the long shadow America has cast on our country has led us to overlook and, more important, underestimate the oligarchy’s direct and continuing stranglehold on the nation’s political and economic life. Indeed, it was Filipino collaboration with America in the political sphere that set the stage for the economic ascendance and eventual domination of and by the nascent native ruling class. In the previous Spanish period, this group was always tiny and marginalized because if they were confined too far from the center of power and a more rigid color line could not be crossed.

Who would step into the vacuum Spain left behind and, over the next decades of Pax Americana, acquire bigger and bigger and eventually controlling shares of the lucrative export trade in sugar, coconut and mining products? Who would come to dominate Manila’s business world and what once loomed as a promising manufacturing sector? Who took over huge expanses of urban land that later turned into fabulous real estate empires? Who gained titles to vast plantations in the provinces that ended up as powerful bastions of political dynasties, one turning out not one but two presidents in more recent years?

Under the leadership of Osmeña and Quezon, a new elite was created or recreated from remnants of the Spanish system with increments of power and favors first doled out piece by piece by the Taft Republicans and much more generously by Wilsonian Democrats in the crucial period between 1912-1920. On a lighter note, it comes as no surprise that the richest of the future real estate fortunes would name its showcase subdivision as Forbes Park. Two of Manila’s principal streets would be called Taft Avenue and F.B. Harrison.

Quezon took the strategic offensive in the economic field, buttressing its political influence in the emerging nation. Its bastion of choice was the sugar industry when sugar was king and its share of exports stood at 60 percent until as late as the 1970s under the Marcos dictatorship. The major sugar centrals were parceled out along with the quotas that guaranteed premium prices and windfall profits under American law. The Philippine National Bank was the only bank of significance and it was ruled by the powerful troika of Quezon, Osmeña and Harrison.

Inevitably, the balance shifted to Quezon who counted the biggest fortunes in his corner – Elizalde, Madrigal, Soriano, Ayala, Araneta. All the rest quietly abandoned Osmeña and played along with the winning side. In 1920, PNB became bankrupt with rampant corruption and millions of dollars in unpaid loans. The sugar industry, in the Philipines and America alike, was in deep crisis. But politics, not market forces ruled. Washington bailed out PNB.

It was Quezon who became the prototype of the Filipino leader, the idol of succeeding generations of politicians from Manuel Roxas to Ferdinand Marcos, from to Ninoy Aquino and Fidel Ramos. Quezon spanned the gamut of one-party to two-party systems to dire proposal of a party-less government, all of which required his imprimatur and one-man rule. Crony capitalism he created by himself with top cronies and business partners like the Elizalde brothers, Francisco Ortigas, Vicente Madrigal and the Ayalas. All succeeding presidents followed the master’s example with Marcos perfecting the art simply because he ruled longest of all as president, some 20 years compared to Quezon’s nine, the last three as an exiled and dying man.

After the fall of Marcos, the Philippines would be run by the book-end presidencies of the Aquinos mother and son, sandwiched by three other presidents – Ramos, Estrada, Arroyo – who never had the chance or inclination to depart too far from Aquino’s Edsa orthodoxy.

The Philippine government’s response would be politics as usual, its ballooning debts subsidized by a surging remittance economy based on mass export of labor with the corresponding decline of manufacturing and the onerous social costs of mass poverty and millions of broken families.

That this would result in May 2016 in the stunning victory of Rodrigo Duterte, a maverick of mavericks from Davao, demands closer scrutiny of the damaged but resilient political system that has so far eluded fundamental structural change. That Duterte decisively defeated Manuel Roxas II, grandson of Quezon’s chosen heir, speaks volumes about the persistence of the unrepentant old order. This poses an ominous warning that unless the system changes course, out of sheer self-interest in survival, towards some modicum of genuine reform, its days in power may be finally numbered.

Empowered with true democratic ideas and political movements that have learned and are still learning to stand up to dictators and imperial might, the once disenfranchised common people and small countries that constitute the majority of the human race will no longer stay silent and servile. Times have changed. More sooner than later, they will take power into their hands by all and whatever means necessary.

So, the question is, can Duterte change the fate of the Filipinos?