‘To the last, President Duterte displayed his mistaken belief that the arbitral ruling in favor of the Philippines is ineffectual, because China did not participate. Of course, the only other entity that shares his belief is China…’
THE sitting President’s final State of the Nation Address is a swan song of sorts — while he or she still has a year to go in the six-year term, no other speech henceforth will command the same level of national attention than the SONA. While the inaugural in 2022 will certainly stop traffic, to turn a phrase, the outgoing President will play more of a secondary role, relinquishing the highest office in the land to the President-Elect at high noon. While one year is still a fairly long time, attention will move further away from Malacañan Palace; elected officials, especially those seeking reelection or a higher post, will shift to their election bids full time after the filing of certificates of candidacy in October. Christmas will then roll around, and you have a short lull before campaign season officially begins in February 2022.
The first 20 minutes of President Duterte’s SONA went well: he enumerated (as expected) the achievements of his administration, rattling off initiatives like free education, universal healthcare, free irrigation, and perhaps his most favorite: the war on drugs. He also thanked the private sector, the country’s international development partners as well as the local government units for their cooperation and contribution to the pandemic response; this recognition is very much deserved.
The President also mentioned two priority bills aimed to strengthen his relationship with the military and the police: his pitch to provide free legal assistance to members of the AFP and the PNP who face prosecution for the “performance of their duties” as well as a bill for the pension, separation, and retirement of uniformed personnel. It sounds like a continued pitch to stay in the good graces of the uniformed establishment, given that there was no mention of where the President intends to source the budget for such initiatives (I suppose that’s up to Congress and the Finance department to figure out.)
The President also went for the easy wins: longer passport validity, addressing the backlog for the issuance of driver’s licenses, as well as the national ID system. He did go off script several times, especially to talk about why the communists are bad, bad people. And they must be earning billions because they are able to send their children to European universities. It seems, five years later, President Duterte is still very much fixated on communist rebels, which is quite strange for a supposedly “spent force.” Of course, the question to be asked is this: despite this administration’s intense focus on ending the insurgency, why are they still a main point of concern (to even merit an extended mention in the last Duterte SONA) five years later? What became of these intense efforts?
To the last, President Duterte displayed his mistaken belief that the arbitral ruling in favor of the Philippines is ineffectual, because China did not participate. Of course, the only other entity that shares his belief is China, who has held this position from the very beginning.
The refrain to avoid war was likewise repeated, which is unsurprising; to the binary mind grounded on violence, the nuances of the diplomatic policy and the relationship among nations flies past. It seemed especially incongruous followed by his riff against disadvantageous water contracts; he saved his bravado for this chest-thumping exercise, extolling against the evils of the water companies and recounting his threat to expropriate their water systems. While I am nowhere near the side of these water companies, I wish the even the same level of resoluteness was directed to assert our claim over the Sea of Many Names.
There was likewise a deliberate attempt to gloss over the economic figures — at one point, President Duterte mentioned the debt-to-GDP ratio from 2018. Which should have been good for the 2019 SONA, not for 2021. Perhaps they did not want reality to rear its ugly head — after all, people are waiting to hear how the government intends to lift our country out of this deep, deep, hole created by the pandemic.
The President likewise went into the pandemic response a little after an hour and a half into his speech — touting 7M Filipinos already received the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
According to data analyst Edson Guido, 10.1% of our population has received one dose of the vaccine, while only 5.5% of the population has been fully vaccinated, which translates to a little over 6 million Filipinos (for context, 6 million is more or less half of the population of the National Capital Region.) The latter figure was conspicuously missing from the SONA.
In any case, as of this writing, the President is 14 minutes into the second hour of his last SONA. Stay tuned for next week’s column, dear millennials and fillennials, this sounds like a long one.
