With every electoral exercise, the situation gets worse.
Across the country, dynasty-building is becoming deeply entrenched. Politics as a family business is becoming institutionalized.
And just like any business, the principal goal is profit – not for the public, but for the businessman. Those who get in the way of profit-making can end up as dead meat (sometimes literally).
These days, families want to put every able member into every possible position in their turf, from the barangay to the city or town council all the way to the provincial capitol and Congress.
Not content, they want their entire clan, if possible, occupying all 24 seats in the Senate. This is no hyperbole; they will do it, if voters allow it. Their argument for building dynasties boils down to this: because they can.
Yes, they can, but there’s such a thing as self-restraint, which is supposed to separate man from beast. Just because you can is no reason to murder political rivals, for example, or order the mass execution of anyone remotely suspected of drug links.
This “because we can” mindset underpinned the massacre of 58 people by the Ampatuans, carried out against those who dared to challenge the clan’s decade-long stranglehold on government in Maguindanao.
During that decade, Maguindanao remained among the poorest provinces in the country, while the Ampatuans amassed enormous unexplained wealth, which they used to further reinforce their hold on the province.
With that kind of control, sustained through a combination of the traditional guns, goons and gold, the clan also courted support from the national leadership by delivering votes during elections. Whether the votes were real or manufactured may never be known definitively.
If the Ampatuans had not gone overboard in believing that they could get away with the Maguindanao massacre, they would probably still be in power today, sustained by the abject poverty and undereducation of the constituents. And they will still be winning every election – because they can.
The Maguindanao massacre is an extreme example of dynasty building and warlord excesses. But milder cases are no less destructive to the social fabric and governance.
A dynast described it as “political democracy.”
It’s democratic travesty – another reason for leaders in several of our less democratic but more prosperous and better governed neighbors to denigrate democracy as practiced in the Philippines.
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The Supreme Court has been asked by a group of lawyers to compel Congress to perform its constitutional mandate of passing an enabling law prohibiting or at least regulating dynasties.
Lawmakers’ self-serving refusal to pass the enabling law, the petitioners argued, should be considered as an act of “monumental omission” and unconstitutional dereliction of duty.
The Supreme Court must save the nation from this pestilence that is eating away at the foundations of governance.
Except in the central bank and its Monetary Board plus most of the government-owned or controlled corporations, government posts offer modest pay. It makes you wonder why people are ready to commit murder over elective posts even at the barangay level, and why people want to make politics their family business, treating government positions as a birthright.
The government has become the nation’s biggest (and still growing) employer, with no corresponding improvement in the quality of public service.
In many cases, persons who are good for nothing else are assured of a cushy job, without worrying about a performance audit, on the sheer strength of their surname. They are often the ones who insist on enjoying all the trappings of public office in this country, all courtesy of taxpayers: the police and military bodyguards, the wang-wang to part the traffic.
In Mandaluyong on my way to an interview before noon yesterday, for example, motorists were shooed away by two motorcycle cops, with blinkers and wang-wang on, escorting a black heavily tinted Alphard van with no license plates. All along I thought such escort services are now banned, especially for VIPs too yellow-bellied to allow their identification through their vehicle license plates. Also, the police should be arresting vehicles with no license plates instead of escorting them.
Alphard is the vehicle of choice of Philippine offshore gaming operators, whose bosses also prefer cops as personal escorts. But with POGOs now taking so much heat, that was more likely the convoy of a lowlife politician.
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Instead of serving the public, such politicians think public funds and resources are meant to serve their personal interests.
We will never see the likes of Jacinda Ardern, who stepped down last year as New Zealand prime minister because she felt she no longer had “enough in the tank” for the job.
Congressmen were correct in subjecting under minute scrutiny the fund utilization of Sara Duterte as Vice President, education secretary and tangentially when she was Davao City mayor.
Her supporters, however, also struck a chord when they asked how Stella Luz Quimbo, who presided over the budget deliberations, could now afford Hermes handbags after her fairly recent career shift from University of the Philippines economics professor to Marikina congresswoman. Does public office pay that well?
VP Sara’s attitude of personal entitlement to public resources springs from her clan’s dynastic control over Davao City. And she is not alone.
The dynasty building that has now reached shameless proportions, as we are seeing in the current election season, has short-circuited the system of checks and balances that is critical in a functioning democracy. Except in cases of rivalries within a single family, relatives aren’t going to exercise oversight functions over each other.
Among families and animals, inbreeding even among distant relatives has been blamed for weakening bloodlines and spoiling the species.
Dynasty-building can be likened to inbreeding in government, which is weakening our already weak republic.