Aburido

It is hard not to notice, even for his believers and diehard supporters. The old man from Davao, 76-year-old Rodrigo Roa Duterte, president of the Republic of the Philippines, is getting to be very cranky and irritable these days. There is a Cebuano phrase for it, which he can understand perfectly pirme na lang aburido.

There was a time when it was Duterte who needled his enemies for sport, made them angry, lose sleep. Now it seems the shoe is on the other foot. It looks like it now takes very little to get under his skin, make him angry, lose sleep. And what to him was just for sport, it is for his enemies in aid of their election, or reelection.

But I do not think it is because his enemies are winning or even just gaining. Up to this time, the opposition remains as ragtag as ever. If elections were held today, no one among them can beat whoever Duterte endorses once he steps down. What is driving him aburido is his creeping realization that he is being done in by his trusted friends.

At the start of his presidency, he has vowed to stamp out corruption. And while that was a truly impossible task, he did go after corruption with hammer and tongs the way none of his predecessors has ever gone after anything with hammer and tongs before. And for a while he did succeed. This is one of the factors behind his consistently high approval ratings even up to today.

That is until the friends he trusted became themselves the problem. Having vouched for these friends for so long, he cannot but feel a deep sense of betrayal when it became glaringly apparent that huge amounts of money that should have been part of the terrible cost of fighting the pandemic were being lost and lost to corruption. Worse, his friends could not have been blissfully innocent of the loss.

Up to this point, there is neither evidence nor indication that Duterte himself may be personally involved. But the sheer immensity of the losses, in their tens of billions, makes it ridiculous not to entertain even the slightest suspicion that some of his friends were, at the very least, complicit in their disappearance.

And having vouched for these friends to the point of ascribing to them that kind of impossible integrity that is beyond the slightest whiff of suspicion, it must have now become very hard for Duterte to take criticisms and allegations of corruption involving the friends whose backs he had for the longest of times.

What makes it even more nettling to Duterte is the fact that his enemies and critics are now at it for their own political purposes, the most vocal ones being those who are seeking election or reelection. Duterte is being fried in his own fat. If it is any consolation, at least Duterte is just ranting on TV. We all know that given the darker side of his reputation, he could have exploded in ways with direr consequences.

The tragedy, and eternal enigma, of the Philippines is that Filipinos are inherently very trusting of friends even if, at the same time, most Filipinos would break the line if no one is looking, which is to say no one is to be trusted at all. Duterte can still extricate himself from the mess just by being his bad self and start kicking ass. I can just imagine, though, how personally painful that will be. Just considering it can make one truly aburido.