What Duterte wants — Duterte gets?

We Filipinos have a saying that goes: “Ang utos ng Hari – Hindi mababali.” In English: “The King’s commands cannot be broken.”

I am seriously concerned of the strong possibility that the Cabinet Secretaries of President Duterte have reached a point where they find it more convenient to blindly follow the President’s orders even if doing so would place the President and the government in hot waters and end up doing more harm than good.

Consider the following incidents: When the President prematurely announced the availability of 5-year driver’s license cards, nobody dared to raise the point that the supplies were not yet available and it would create a seven-month backlog. Officials simply said: “it’s done, we can’t contradict the President, lets simply do what we can.” As a result poor defenseless front line employees of the LTO took a beating from the irate public who wanted their 5-year license cards! Recently we learned that the President can’t put an end to contractualization or ENDO by way of an Executive Order because there are actual laws providing for certain forms of employment via contractualization. The problem is it took all of two years for someone to tell the President he can’t!

Then there was the one-day confusion about the President allegedly abolishing the NFA Board only to be recalled after the President met up with rice traders. These are just some of the situations where the President’s advisers may have opted to keep quiet or just let the President do and say what he wants until such a time when someone else corrects or criticizes the President.

I’m afraid that we now have a pending disaster in the form of the Boracay Island shutdown. Once again all the President’s YES Men and Women simply declared: “Ours is not to reason why – Ours is but to do or die!

As a result the Cabinet Secretaries and their teams have spent the last 3 weeks fast tracking an IRR or Implementing Rules and Regulations for what will be done on Boracay Island in the next 6 months. Before writing this article I sought out a number of stakeholders to get a better perspective on the matter.

The impression I got is that President Duterte’s people are so focused on complying with the “King’s wishes” that the IRR and the shut down will ultimately look as if Martial Law had been declared on the island, most of the residents and stakeholders treated as unwanted squatters or criminals and all “rights and remedies” disregarded. People will be disenfranchised in terms of property rights, legal rights, and investments while thousands of daily wage earners will be displaced! Even the Media will be subjected to physical censorship akin to those covering war zones!

That is not a solution; it’s a death sentence!

The “total shut down” approach will be equivalent to using poison to cure the patient. It’s like finding weeds in your garden and you spray the whole garden with herbicide where you end up killing everything! While the President’s show of political will is truly admirable, Malacañang’s declaration of the shutdown of Boracay was clearly premature because no real action plan had been properly studied and produced. There was nothing on the table! Everything happened so fast and the President’s announcement took them by surprise! In fact, the initial issue was about the “Cesspool,” sewage, and road widening. But for some strange reason, the teams decided to throw everything they did not like into the pot!

Every person who has set foot on Boracay for the last 30 years have, good or bad, contributed to the current state of affairs. I dare say that the National Government is just as guilty as the rest of us and they should not go around drawing a line on the sand saying they are the good guys and everyone else is guilty. One homeowner I know of, bought property from an islander in the ’80s, eventually got all his papers in order including survey, building permit, and everything required by law to build his house. A few years after, then President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo signed an Executive Order declaring his patch of land and everything around it as “Forest Land.”

I watched an elderly lady state that she had been on the island for eight decades. In that time the sea level has risen, the high tide mark has arbitrarily been moved time and again the same way rules and laws are crafted and drafted to fit the agenda, interest or schemes of powerful people in and out of government. I spoke with a business owner whose biggest complaint was the high handed indifference of Cabinet Secretaries, Usecs and Asecs who all want to “Comply” with the President’s order while dismissing the islanders’ appeals for collaboration and cooperation.

Perhaps the biggest insult and mistake being made by Cabinet members and their staff is the fact that they are rushing to please the “King” while running over the people. There was suppose to be some sort of “town hall meeting with stakeholders” today, but the problem with the idea is that it would be for the sole purpose of presenting the IRR to the people of Boracay. I advised against such a plan because it would simply end up as a bull session, scream off, or worse, the Task Force might end up getting tossed into the cesspool!

I humbly suggest that we all step on the brakes, organize consultative – collaborative workshops aimed specifically at working out as many of the problems and concerns collectively. From there, present a collective resolution and list of solutions to President Duterte. We are all part of the problem – now lets all be part of the solution. Lets start working, not just talking.

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