Paranoid strain
There is a paranoid strain in Philippine politics, which sees a crisis lurking behind every corner and thinks the solution is always a form of decisive presidential intervention. You know infected politicians by their unmistakable symptoms: an unconcealable distaste for democracy’s messy procedures, an unexamined belief in centralized power.
Call it the Pasig strain, after the river which has hosted the country’s center of political power, uninterrupted, for the last few hundred years.
Eastern Samar Rep. Ben Evardone’s proposal last Saturday for the grant of emergency powers to President Aquino is only the latest example of this paranoid strain of politics. The “catastrophic problems” of a looming electric power shortage and inadequate mass transport services, the administration ally said, can be solved by “empowering President Aquino with powers that will expedite the processes of implementing mega power and mass transit systems.”
Even by its own premises, Evardone’s proposal is fatally flawed. But consider the ultimate assumption behind it all. The democratic processes are not working fast enough; let us therefore grant the country’s most powerful official even more power.
No surprise, then, that Evardone’s first example of what President Aquino can do with emergency powers is “shorten the bidding process under the Procurement Act and simplify the Swiss challenge mode of inviting investors in the power and transport sectors.”
Evardone must lack the self-awareness to realize that his description of the problem is an indictment of the very presidency he seeks to invest with emergency powers. “The sad state of our power and mass transit facilities, which [has] been the result of long years of neglect, has had a very debilitating effect on our economy and people.” But the Aquino administration has been in office for three and a half years. The over-deliberate management style of its Department of Transportation and Communications—to give only one instance—is the principal reason why, at this late stage, there is no immediately available remedy to the absurdly overcrowded light rail transit systems in Metro Manila. The DOTC’s painstaking attention to details and avowed horror of the very possibility of corruption may have started as a noble impulse and may have been meant to demonstrate the opposite of neglect, but on the ground it amounts to the same thing.
To be sure, other administration allies, Sen. Francis Escudero and Speaker Feliciano Belmonte among them, have been quick to distance themselves from Evardone’s proposal. President Aquino, too, made short work of it. “I don’t think we’re in a situation where we have to employ Section 17 of Article 12” of the Constitution, he said, referring to the provision allowing Malacañang to take over utilities in national emergencies. “I never asked for the emergency powers.”
No, but for some politicians infected by the Pasig strain it has become second nature to hallucinate over the decisiveness of executive action in contrast to the procedural deliberation of both Congress and the courts. The periodic calls for emergency powers, the prolonged appeals for the President’s personal attention, the persistent obsession with “czars” and other such potent symbols of executive power—they all betray a diminished understanding of where the sources of true political initiative are. Even those political critics who blame the leader in Malacañang, whoever he or she may be, for everything that goes wrong in the country may have caught the Pasig strain, too.
Is there in fact a looming power crisis? Has the deterioration in the country’s mass transport systems reached the point of no return? Are we short of the necessary investors? These are questions of fact, which must be answered by a hard look at the data. But even if the answers to all three questions turn out to be in the affirmative (an unlikely scenario, going by the preliminary data), the case for emergency powers still isn’t made. It is a long way from presumed crisis to Democracy Lite.
