“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,” William Shakespeare wrote.
In the news item, “Duterte says Pimentel made a mistake, Pacquiao ‘only a follower,” (Inquirer.net, 7/17/21), the President belittled the PDP-Laban by saying that it has been asleep for a hundred years and was dormant until he came.
Recall that Sen. Koko Pimentel, erstwhile PDP-Laban president and son of party founder, the late senator Aquilino “Nene” Pimentel, invited then Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, a party outsider, as candidate for president in the 2016 presidential elections, which he eventually won.
PDP-Laban officials are now at odds following a rift between acting party president Sen. Manny Pacquiao and Alfonso Cusi, after the latter proposed that Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte Carpio be the party’s candidate for president in the 2022 elections. Pacquiao is said to have presidential ambitions of his own.
The cracks within the party only worsened when Pacquiao alleged that there has been widespread corruption in the Duterte administration and named the Department of Health under Duterte’s fair-haired boy Secretary Francisco Duque III. Mr. Duterte countered that Pacquiao is only a follower, and “hindi nagbabasa, walang alam, sunod sunod lang.”
These people were singing hosannas to each other before. That is how dirty politics in the Philippines has become. The young Pimentel may have realized by now that he has unwittingly created a Frankenstein.
RAMON MAYUGA
ramon.mayuga49@gmail.com