PRESIDENT Duterte should have given the people a reality check on the pandemic and a clear direction for economic recovery in his final State of the Nation (SONA) address.
This was the consensus of top political analysts who spoke during the recent post-SONA virtual town hall discussion hosted by think tank Stratbase Albert del Rosario Institute (ADRi).
Prof. DindoManhit, Stratbase president, said Duterte failed to spell out urgent solutions and more strategic direction to the health and economic crisis, saying: “We need to mitigate the contingent and enduring consequences of this health crisis…which were not evident in his final SONA.
“I would say that since 2016 we have suffered a pandemic of disinformation. Hopefully, collectively as a society, independent institutions, the media, people in social media, should realize that it is time for us to look for these types of candidates, not based on political narratives or spins,” he added.
Former Education secretary Dr. Edilberto de Jesus, Professor Emeritus and former president of the Asian Institute of Management (AIM), lamented that Duterte’s approach to the pandemic, like his approach to the drug problem, tended to be taken mainly as a law enforcement problem.
“Clearly the (drug) problem had been oversimplified into a law and order issue, which experts are telling us the drug problem is not. It was also a public health issue; it was also a poverty issue, and the problem was that this approach to the drug problem tended to spill over into his approach to other concerns such as the pandemic taken mainly as a law enforcement problem.
“The consequence of this approach was that it reinforced an oversimplified approach to serious, complicated, complex governance issues including the issue of the pandemic and the issue of national security.”
Judge Raul Pangalangan of the International Criminal Court and StratbaseADRi trustee, said the pandemic, while it “threatens our health and our economy… is also an opportunity for well-meaning Filipinos to forge a solidarity unknown in ordinary time and possibly even if fleetingly bring forth the fictive nation that cuts across the lines of social class that divide us today.”
