Duterte deserves credit and criticism

LET’S GIVE credit when it is deserved, and dish out criticism when it is justified. After all, the urge to give credit where it is due does not erase the need to dish out warranted criticism.

First, President Duterte practices double standard when he ignores the lives and dreams destroyed by the misrule of Ferdinand Marcos but goes into a rage when he deals with the lives and dreams destroyed by drug syndicates. Marcos destroyed the future of an entire country in such a magnitude that keeps us reeling from the political, economic and social disasters he brought on us. Mr. Duterte will greatly diminish his moral authority to direct his wrath on the destroyers of lives and dreams if he continues to nurture his insolent infatuation with the Marcoses.

Second, the President should learn from the lesson of Thailand in 2003 when then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra launched a “war on drugs” in his country. Says Human Rights Watch: “In the first three months of the campaign, there were some 2,800 extrajudicial killings. In 2007, an official investigation found that more than half of those killed had no connection whatsoever to drugs.”

In the dark and isolated alleys where suspected drug pushers and users are cornered by lawmen, it’s not the President who pulls the trigger. The decision to kill is literally or figuratively made under cover of darkness by anyone of the 160,000 policemen deployed all over the country, and the risk is high that a large number of them will kill for reasons other than self-defense. It will be one life too late if we wait for an innocent relative or friend to turn up as a corpse to convince us that this rampaging plague of extrajudicial killings will spiral out of control.

After condemnation comes commendation.

Mr. Duterte’s plan to uphold freedom of information (FOI) through an executive order is a political masterstroke. Such an executive order will give citizens the right to demand information from all executive agencies controlled by him. The legislature and the judiciary will be exposed as undemocratic institutions hiding skeletons in their closets if they will not issue similar regulations in their respective branches.

Whoever conceptualized this move for the President to issue an FOI executive order—instead of waiting for an FOI law from Congress —deserves high praise. This recourse will demolish 27 years of legislative blockade: Congress has refused to pass an FOI law despite 16 attempts since 1989. This is also one issue where PDu30 will outshine P-Noy because the latter proved to be a disappointment for refusing to back the passage of an FOI law despite having made such a promise when he was campaigning for the presidency.

The President’s appointment of Vice President Leni Robredo to a Cabinet post as head of the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council is also praiseworthy. This gives respect to the 14.4 million voters who elected the Vice President. And this shows the willingness of the President to change his stance after listening to public sentiment and reason. Let’s continue to badger him on issues where he needs to change his mind.

Among the other laudable plans of Mr. Duterte, I will be generous with praise on his plan to prioritize the building of four railway systems in the country. “It’s Manila-Nueva Vizcaya, then Manila-Sorsogon, Manila to Batangas, and the whole Mindanao,” he said in explaining the four train routes he plans to build.

The people’s need for transportation should be provided on a community basis, not on an individual basis, in the same way that the people’s needs for water and electricity are provided on a community basis.

To show how the government’s policy on transportation has been all wrong, imagine a scenario where the policy on individualistic transportation is similarly implemented in the people’s water and electricity needs. The lack (or utter inadequacy) of community transportation like trains forces us to have individual cars, and the lack of water and energy sources that serve the entire community also forces us to have individual electric generators and individual water pumps. The pollution caused by millions of electric generators and the water shortage caused by millions of water pumps draining our aquifers are the counterparts of the pollution and road-space shortage that we have in our transportation needs.

This illustrates why past administrations were wrong in neglecting the public need for railway systems that should serve the communities, instead of allowing the runaway growth of private vehicles that merely serve individuals.

In the same way that our water and energy resources are limited, our roads are limited, so we must maximize their use for preferential community transportation.

The traffic congestion in our streets and the polluted air we breathe show that our country will not attain the kind of development that will improve our lives if we continue on the road to individualistic modes of transportation. The aim of the government must be to introduce “measures that move people out of cars and into public transportation.”

As one saying goes: “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.”

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