An urgent call against political dynasties

I will ask apology from my publisher and editor, as I beg the indulgence of my readers for steering head-on into a hot and unquestionably a contentious topic. Today, I will sound like a politician that I used to be many years ago.

It is still a little more than two weeks from today when we will cast our votes yet I feel the urgency to up the tempo, so to speak, in campaigning against political dynasties. I am driven by the fear that the issues vigorously raised by candidates against one another may have taken our attention away from this more fundamental topic. For the sake of our country and in the interest of the generations to come, let us fight against every candidate who represents these families that have ruled over our politics for decades. To make our task less daunting that it already is, let us focus on the senate.

For a start, we must remember the 1986 Constitutional Commission. They were the 50 men and women, whose sense of nationalism were higher than most of us, and whose understanding of the constitutional was far more profound than many, who were picked by then President Corazon C. Aquino. Their marching directive was to write a pro-God and pro-people constitution.

Among the issues that the Con-Com tackled was the domination of the political dynasties. The delegates to that distinguished assembly declared it a state policy to open up the opportunities of public service to as broad a base as possible. By such statement of a creed, the learned commissioners point to the dismantling of the political dynasties as an unerring road towards the democratization of our republic. When we ratified the constitution with an overwhelming mandate, we, in effect, chorused our national commitment to this direction.

The dictionary, by the way, defines a dynasty as a succession of rulers coming from a family.  To apply it to politics in order to suit to our context, political dynasty refers to the succession of people belonging to the same bloodline in holding certain government positions, the Senate in this write-up.

Political dynasties, no matter how these people justify their domination, are against the basic tenets of democracy and republicanism - "of the people, by the people and for the people". When few families control the membership in the senate, they deny other people who are not related to them by consanguinity or affinity, the chance to serve our country.

There are more than 90 million Filipinos today. Our Senate has a membership composition of only 24 senators. And yet, as it is shaping now, courtesy of the projections made by different poll surveys, our senate will continue to be dominated by less than two dozen families. Hit your calculators and you will never err in concluding that the representation of these families is grotesquely disproportionate to our population.

I say "less than two dozen families" because of  the distinct possibility of the presence of two Ejercito brothers and two Cayetanos as senators. I am sure that their individual differences notwithstanding, their social concerns are molded and dictated by their common environments. The intelligence quotients of Sen. Jinggoy and Cong. JV (the latter, a shoo-in as a senator, according to the surveys) may not be the same because one may be brighter than the other, but I can bet that the teachings they imbibed in their families cannot be radically different. 

Among those who are rating high in the surveys are an Angara and an Aquino (of the administration) and a Binay, and an Enrile (form the opposition). They are candidates designed to preserve our inequitable and undemocratic political hierarchy by ensuring the continued dominance by their families of the Philippine political arena. Considering that from our national experience political power is the foundation of economic power, their presence will be anathema to the true meaning of a republic because they will deprive the economically less privileged but intellectually more prepared  members of our society from the chance to put in the anvil of legislation their hopes and aspirations.

On May 13, we can start correcting this political wrong by NOT voting for political dynasties. Let's consider for senator a Jun Magsaysay (his father, the president died in 1957) and a Bal Falcone, a Cebuano with brilliant academic credentials!