During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Rodrigo Duterte made this promise: If elected, he would completely wipe out the drug problem in six months, and should he fail to accomplish this, he would step down.
Well, six months has come and gone. Instead of keeping his promise, the double-talking, sly-as-a-fox former Davao City mayor and prosecutor is still very much at it: going after drug suspects, not through the halls of justice but through the gun barrels of trigger-happy “law enforcers” (henchmen?).
The question is: How many more people, from the poor and oppressed side of society, must die before this President realizes that he is no longer just an official attending to just one city, where his crude “either my way or, you-take-the-highway” style of leadership worked because… well, it was easy enough to intimidate one city? It’s high time Mr. Duterte realized that he is now head of a whole nation, compared to which Davao City is but an itsy-bitsy place; that to apply the same medieval method of governance to a nation of over 100 million people just won’t work—not without taking the risk of inviting an uprising.
Except for that cry-baby chief Keystone cop at his side, I don’t think that our men in uniform are all dumb. They may sometimes seem to be kowtowing to the President’s whims and caprices but, deep in their hearts where nationalism counts, when push comes to shove, so to speak, their sense of duty to their country will surely prevail.
Mr. President, the time limit you imposed on yourself for eliminating the nation’s drug problem, once and for all, is long over. You can’t go on randomly killing more people, some of whom may not actually be at all involved in drugs. It’s time you gave up and admitted that you’ve been a failure—a huge failure from the start because, all along, you are clearly the wrong person for the job. The game is over. It’s time to give up the presidency, as you promised during the campaign.
The whole nation, the whole archipelago, is just too much, too complicated, and too hot for you to handle—the right way. And make sure to take that comedian cop, those butt-licking brods and diehard lapdogs of yours with you when you go. You would be doing your country a great favor.
JUANITO T. FUERTE, jtfuerte@comcast.net