The trouble with the parliamentary system!

Manila: If there's anything totally frustrating in going to Manila these days, it's when you take a Philippine Airlines plane and land at the Centennial Terminal and you didn't make any arrangements to have a friend meet you. That's exactly what happened to me last Monday evening where I arrived at 8:30 p.m. and I couldn't find a taxicab anywhere. By this, I mean, you have to go up the departure or arrival area. I don't know why this is so, but after a long frustrating wait... I ended up getting a Rent-a-car and paying P550 for the short ride from the airport to Makati. For a foreigner that's only US$10 bucks, for a Cebuano... that's highway robbery!

I had to be in Manila to pay my respects for a dear friend and compare, Mr. Josefino "Joey" Pineda, one of my oldest and closest friends in Manila and I didn't want to bother their family with meeting me at the airport. Anyway, just for the record, from the AIM Hotel in Makati, I took a cab to the Arlington Memorial Homes in Sta. Mesa... perhaps five times the distance between Makati to the airport and the taxi fare only cost P130!

Perhaps PAL executives who never experience this problem because they have their drivers fetch them ought to see this as a potential problem. PAL planes are great and the service is superb, but if at the end of your trip you still feel disgusted because the taxi fare to the hotel is more expensive than the per-seat-mile of the airplane... then something is terribly wrong. Could it be that the rent-a-car companies paid someone to keep the taxicabs off the Centennial Terminal so they could have exclusivity? I'm only asking.

PAL executives ought to know that the advantage Cebu Pacific has over them is that, in the present terminal that they are using... it is so close to the main road, you can grab a taxicab anytime. They should be reminded that PAL once had a huge advantage against Cebu Pacific on airplanes, but since their refleeting, this is no longer an issue. Hence, small irritants like getting a cab can spell a difference in their marketing strategies.

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In Manila, I had great business lunch with my primo Prof. Ed Cabuang of the La Salle University and Atty. Lino Faelnar, all members of the Save our Languages through Federalism (Solfed) to talk about what's happening in the cha-cha. What Prof. Cabuang reported was... that Congress has already finished with its final draft of the amendments of the Constitution and they have totally disregarded the draft proposal, which was crafted by the Consultative Commission (ConCom).

That means, for most part of the year 2006, the Arroyo administration, will be barnstorming the country selling the idea of this shift from our present Presidential form of government into a Parliamentary form of government. But like what we've been saying... a Parliamentary form of government is a fusion of both the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch of our present system of governance... and this means, Imperial Manila would become even stronger than it is today. This is why it needs the check and balance that a Federal system has to offer, where strong states can equalize an equally strong Parliament.

But these days haven't augured well for the Parliamentary system. Let me cite two important incidents. First is the one you can read in the world news today...about the beleaguered Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who has been asked to resign by thousands of anti-government protesters? Sounds familiar? Indeed, it is not only Tita Glo who is experiencing political turmoil, even the very stable Thai government is having such problems. Yet House Speaker Jose de Venecia and former Pres. Fidel V. Ramos want this country to shift to a Parliamentary system? Well, if you looked at it from the Thai experience, I think this is going to be a problem.

The other Parliamentary brouhaha happened just a couple of months ago in Germany (which is a federal country) when there was an impasse as to who was going to be the chancellor... either challenger Angela Merkel or Gerhard Schroeder? At least after 3 long weeks without a leader, Germany decided on having their first female chancellor in Angela Merkel.

What has the German political experience taught us? That Germany because it is a Federalized State... continued to go on business as usual even if the Bundestag was in a gridlock state. This proves once and for all that even if we shifted to a Parliamentary system of government, there really is no guarantee that we've gotten rid of the problem of gridlock plaguing our present system today. But because the nine States (they're called Landers) in Germany wasn't threatened by the political upheaval, all of Germany didn't care when politicians made trouble for themselves. This is why it is a must for the Philippines to Federalize first rather than shift to a Parliamentary, which gives the rest of the country any good advantage.

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