Aggressive power, blunt sword

If I am to sum up President Rodrigo Duterte’s four years in office, it is in those words. And this pandemic has indeed exposed that kind of governance.

A blunt sword hurts but does not cut cleanly. Take the war on drugs; it eliminated thousands of suspected low-level shabu peddlers, yet it also left the nation and its institutions morally bankrupt. The public appeared to cheer the clenched iron fist method, but only from the sidelines. Aggressive power had no room for the public and civil society to be on board as a community fighting the scourge.

The communists have, for a long time post-EDSA, been in the periphery. Their influence was limited only to a few pockets of villages in remote parts of the archipelago. Previous administrations had even declared that the CPP-NPA no longer pose a serious threat to national security. Yet the current government projects them now as the number one security threat in the country. This is so it can justify a sweeping and constitutionally questionable anti-terrorism law. It borrows from the Marcos playbook which forced erstwhile loud yet moderate voices above ground to go silent and extreme underground. From about 350 armed members in 1971, CPP-NPA cadres numbered to more than 20,000 by the late 1980s.

Just when we thought that the flood of pro-administration trolls in social media would make this administration also tolerant of opposing voices, administration officials and their allies in the House of Representatives ganged up on ABS-CBN and removed it from the airwaves. They say it was not a press freedom issue. Yet it chilled the spine of truly discordant voices – voices we need to hear from time to time as a check against the abuses of those in power.

To create a semblance of stability, a government that systematically ignores fundamental moral truths will find itself ruling by and on hard power, and fear. As they say, “aggressive power beats people up; soft power wins them over.”

In the current pandemic, aggressive power is again highlighted. Literal midnight, impromptu presidential speeches tried to cast boldness and charisma. Yet, this time, these failed in projecting both because a frightened public was looking for substance. The political chest-thumping could not hide the weaknesses of the government response from the start – underestimating the virus early on, late in shutting down inbound flights from China, and lack of mass testing and efficient contact tracing.

In fairness, we laud the efforts of many frontline government officials and employees in fighting the spread of the virus. The appointment by the president of an overseer from the national government, for example, helped in slowly turning the tide against the spread of the virus in Cebu City. The city was earlier beset by a dysfunctional local government more conscious of its image than what is truly at stake. Today, active cases and positivity rates are going down, while recovery rates are going up. And hospitals are now more able to cope with the demand for COVID-19 treatment. From enforcing blanket lockdowns, the city is now in the stage of imposing granular lockdowns on certain areas affected by the infection. This is one bright spark that gives us a little optimism.

I hope that in the last two years of the Duterte administration, soft power takes precedence over aggressive power. That the sharp sword of wisdom and meritocracy takes the place of the blunt sword of foolhardiness and political accommodation.

We want the president to succeed because he is the captain of the ship and we are in that ship.