This week we were confronted by a President who changed his mind on charter amendment which he steadfastly protected from the start of his reign as a legacy of an iconic mother – a family heirloom.

The circumstances leading to this drastic turn-around may have been precipitated by series of events revealed to Pnoy’s adoring public. These morsels of facts were first divulged by a coterie of whistle-blowers cheated of their share of the loot. What was once an arcane art known only to the practitioners in the highest and rarified atmosphere of the elected were now bared open to the scrutiny of the rabble.

Quite recently, we wake up to the screaming headlines of Newspapers that alert us about the outbreak of Ebola virus from Central & West Africa infecting people from several countries. Spread of this disease is now made easier due to plane travel that whisk people from continent to continent in a few hours. And this disease has an incubation period of from 2 days to 3 weeks.

(Paraphrasing Clinton’s 1992 Campaign Slogan v/s George Bush – the father)

The next President should have one thing foremost in mind – the economy. In the Philippines, succession to power also means destruction or watering down of prior policies from the previous administration. Whether they are good or bad, everything goes down the drain; the baby along with the bath water.

The country does not know this yet but Mindanao could be engulfed in a conflagration, if Pnoy does not address the one question that will make or break his legacy.

Charter Change

I was introduced to the Comics Strips by my father in the early 50s when I started to read. I love the daily newspapers that carry them although during those years, they were mostly in black and white. I still read the comic strips even today. I simply love them. They are a good diversion from the daily fare we get from the news – what with the PDAF scams and the DAP.

Last week, we made a case of Pnoy’s blatant transgressions on the uses of DAP, which the Supreme Court decided as unconstitutional. We opened the debate on the impeachability of the acts of the President. But impeachment of a President is a ‘political process’ and commences with a bill of specifics that must emanate from the ‘lower house’. And here, numbers prevail as Pnoy has his minions in that chamber.

Now, it’s in the open and blatantly so. The President used the enormous power of the purse in order to impeach the former Chief Justice Renato Corona.The poor fellow never had a chance. And to put the last nail on the coffin – Corona faces cases of tax evasion filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and possibly disbarment which are in the hands of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) and the Supreme Court.

From a Political Movement to a Political Party

In 2009 together with a partner in TACDRUP ⃰ an NGO, supported by Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAS) we conceptualized the SUCCESSOR GENERATION Program. This was to be a vanguard of the youth and young professionals who will take over from us, the older generation, the responsibility of forging ahead and initiate changes in the political firmament to bring about good governance and eventually the progress of our society.

Short History of the Philippines

The Philippines by any measure of antiquity is much younger than the nations, states or political entities in Indo-China. We are an archipelago isolated from the mainland by bodies of water, the West Philippine and the South China seas. We are splintered into 7,107 Islands roughly grouped in 3 main landmasses, but none dominant and all flourishing with diverse ethnicities and languages. Our conflicts were mostly internal confined within the archipelago and characterized by the usurpation of the encroaching cultures from the south across the seas in a wave of migrations over the eons driving the low-landers to the mountains.

This is because the Philippine President controls Congress and the Judiciary!

The Executive Department, headed by Pnoy, which by our Constitution is co-equal with the other two branches of Government – the Congress and Judiciary,is in fact the ‘primus inter-pares’.