Political Fujiwhara

A weather bulletin issued by the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) last Friday startled us. It reported that the severe tropical storm Kristine, (international code name Trami) which just blew out of the northwestern part of the Philippine Area of Responsibility (PAR), and headed towards Vietnam and Hainan Island, was observed to have done a kind of U-turn, to use a common traffic term. Its projected return was fearsome because Kristine, brought heavy and intense rains and caused widespread flooding and landslides, resulting in a number of deaths, injuries, and the displacement of hundreds of families.

The weather bureau was quick to explain that the return movement of typhoon Kristine was probably the result of the Fujiwhara effect. According to Japanese meteorologist Sakuhei Fujiwhara, this phenomenon occurs when two nearby cyclonic vortices, within two thousand kilometers, move around each other and close the distance between the circulations of their corresponding low pressure areas. In layman’s language, they pull each other closer together and that could explain the seeming U-turn of Kristine.

There is typhoon Leon (international name: Kong Rey), which PAGASA reported the other day as located 2,500 kilometers away from the Visayas and threatened to enter the PAR by today. It was this typhoon that was forecast to pull back Kristine to its earlier Luzon path where it caused extensive damage, although as of the Friday bulletin of the weather bureau both disturbances were still significantly far from each other.

In the Philippine political scene, we witnessed from the legislative investigations conducted separately by the Senate and the House of Representatives the unraveling of destructive social and financial typhoons.

For obvious lack of space, let me mention just two calamities. The first storm involved the increasingly-mounting evidence culled from the declarations of witnesses euphemistically called “resource persons” tending to point culpability to former president Rodrigo Duterte in the thousands of deaths in the anti-drug war. I want to call it Typhoon EJK-Kristine. Personalities known for their closeness to the past president one after another began to spill the beans that would likely reveal the bloodied hands of Duterte. As I wove these testimonies together, I came to a conclusion that those extra-judicial killings fueled by a perverted form of reward system destroyed the fiber of our justice system worse than what was reined by martial law.

The second storm appeared from the other legislative inquiries which exposed the corrupt ways of siphoning the so-called Confidential and Intelligence Funds. I will label this one as Typhoon CIF-Leon. I heard the explanation made by the Commission on Audit that there was a kind justification given by the office of the secretary of the Department of Education, headed then by Vice President Sara Duterte Carpio for spending ?15 million of CIF. Such justification came in the form of a certification issued by the Armed Forces of the Philippines for a youth program which COA accepted. I shivered in my seat though to hear that all the ?15 million was actually paid out of AFP funds with contributions from certain LGU! In other words, not a centavo was given by DepEd to undertake the youth program and therefore under the headship of Carpio, the ?15 million CIF vanished into thin air.

I pray that the Fujiwhara effect will not make typhoon Leon pull back typhoon Kristine to ravage Luzon again. I also hope that our government will avoid the destructive social and financial Fujiwhara effect by just letting go of Typhoon EJK-Kristine to the more hallowed halls of the International Court of Justice, while attending to the impeachment of Typhoon CIF-Leon!