Presidential arrogance; Rizal and republican Spain

I don’t know why people bother to ask President Aquino if he agrees that we need constitutional reform. The answer will never be yes even if it were good for the country.  Indeed, his answer can be expected: it’s no, no, no. Is that clear? Indeed, why bother to ask?

He does not even seem to understand that the making of constitutions is a combined effort between a country’s leaders and its citizenry. In essence “both sides define the fundamental principles and established precedents according to which a state or organization is to be governed.” It is about the rights of individuals as well as the duties of leaders.

But efforts towards debate,  discussion or studies have been simply brushed off with unbelievable presidential arrogance.  Despite an almost unanimous agreement among constitutional experts and thoughtful citizens that it is time to take up constitutional reform seriously his answer is no.

What?! Is he a king who does only what he wants or what his advisers tell him to want?

It is time to shift the onus of how to bring about constitutional reform away from him or his approval. We are not a dictatorship or a monarchy, therefore sovereign citizens  should get it done if that is  what is needed by the country. 

 From hereon, as we enter into the new year, the burden of good governance is on us. If the stalemate continues we will have only ourselves to blame. We need to change our perspective that nothing can be done to save our country because the President does not want it. If we allow him to stop it by simply saying “no” then we have given up our prerogative and sovereignty by allowing King Aqui..er.. President Aquino to decide unilaterally on how our country should be run. Only a few partisans will admit to it being run well. He is not the first president to have governed badly, but his governance has a dangerous streak that will divide and destroy the country. I don’t want to have to enumerate all the reasons and experiences during his three-year government. Other columnists have taken it up in great detail. And so have international broadcasters when they saw first hand how he handled the Yolanda tragedy. They saw what we have been saying all along that this president is irrelevant. So his “no” has no value. As the saying goes “he is not with it.”

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The focus on amending the economic provisions of the Constitution is to be welcomed and supported.

But it is not the most important amendment necessary for good governance. Its supporters say that without the amendment foreign investors are discouraged from investing in the Philippines when other countries in the region are more hospitable. He had no qualms about saying that the Constitution ratified under his mother’s presidency were  “not detrimental to getting foreign investors in this country.”

He was referring to the provision in the Constitution that restricts to 40 percent foreign ownership of public utilities. But he fumbled when he cited China that grew in leaps and bounds with restricted foreign ownership. It is not true. A simple touch of the google button would have informed him that China even allows land ownership to foreign investors.

He need not make the comparison. The fact is the Philippines is at the bottom of the heap with the ranking 138th out of 185 countries. Among the 10 members of South or Southeast Asian nations it landed as 8th in a recent survey on countries in the region for doing business. World Bank’s International Finance Corp. did the survey. And still Aquino says no to such an amendment.

This is all very well because we need not only investments but the latest technology to create jobs. However, I do not believe that amendments to the provisions on foreign investments is more important than the structure of government. We should change our  politics and structure of government so we can elect more qualified leaders open to reform and change.

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This column missed writing on Rizal Day that was commemorated on December 30. It would have been a good time to remind Filipinos that Jose Rizal owed much of his political teachings to Republican Spain. It is an aspect of his heroism that is not written or talked about which is a pity. The fact is, our national hero was in touch with 19th century Spanish republicanism.

Manuel Sarkisyanz argues in his book Rizal’s Spain that the Filipino hero owed much of his intellectual development to another Spain less known to most Filipinos inured in revolutionary literature.

The book was a “centennial” publication of the National Historical Institute of the Philippines. The theme of the book needs to be resurrected for the education of Filipinos.  

The introduction to the book says  â€œRizal’s execution by Spain at the end of 1896, escapes irony by converting its praise for Spain into a condemnation of the Spain that killed Rizal.” There is a distinction.

“The foundation of Rizal’s thinking and of the reforms he sought from Spain,” stresses Sarkisyanz, “derived less from his family, culture, or Jesuit and Dominican teachers in Manila and more from his association with the politics and writings of Spanish intellectuals, among the most progressive thinkers and activists of their day in Europe.”

This is a perspective that Filipinos should know. In order to understand Rizal more fully, Sarkisyanz writes that we must trace the sources of his intellectual development in republican Spain.

“Rizal’s Spain,” is underemphasized, even omitted, in many biographies and not given its due by many historians of the Philippines. That is the reason for the book.

Indeed, the author drives his point to appreciate the close relation between the Philippines as exemplified by Jose Rizal and republican Spain.

Rather than get bogged down with debates on who should be our national hero or whether or not Rizal was revolutionary, it is time that we connect to the origins of our independence movement with Spain’s own fight for political reforms at the time.

Sarkisyanz drives his point through the book’s cover. It displays the Philippine flag and Rizal’s photo merging into the Spanish flag and the photo of Francisco Pi y Margall (1824-1901), “friend of Rizal,” president of the short-lived Spanish Republic of 1873.  Pi y Margall was a strong advocate of autonomy for Spain’s remaining colonies, among them the Philippines.

In his book Sarkisyanz writes that Rizal was to the Philippines what Pi y Margall was to Spain.