IN the late 1980s, at the Harvard Kennedy School, quite a few of our colleagues were veterans of political turbulence from South America, Africa and the Middle East, where governments fall with the regularity of our typhoons — they offered a curriculum far more vivid than anything in our syllabus. Over brown-bag lunches, they conducted blow-by-blow tutorials on how revolutions, coups d’état, putsches and every imaginable extra-constitutional maneuver are actually managed.

And yes, these convulsions do topple regimes. They do install new ones. But beneath the romance and rhetoric lies a brutal constant: the ordinary citizen — Muhammad, Jamil, Ofedie — is almost always the casualty. Revolutions crown victors but bury the nameless. The slogans are noble; the body counts are not.

Rewards for survivors – Harvard’s curious role

Those who survive the upheavals, from either side, rarely go home empty-handed. They collect ambassadorships, appointed to cabinet posts they are barely trained for, receive mansions with Ferraris in the garage as if they were medals of valor. And then, of course, there are those curious cases where former revolutionaries are “sent” to Harvard.

Not as a prize, far from it. But because history has shown a quiet logic: victorious rebels must undergo metamorphosis. A guerrilla commander who once managed platoons in the mountains must now manage ministries, budgets and the machinery of the modern state. That is where Harvard enters — not as an ivory tower, but as a diplomatic laundromat. Harvard teaches the grammar of statecraft: public finance, diplomacy, negotiation, governance, and pairing the correct wine with the right food, etc.

It is also part of the post-conflict ritual favored by Western and multilateral agencies. They prefer their new partners housebroken, credentialed, and able to pronounce “macroeconomic restructuring” without blinking — and eat at McDonalds without the rice. A year at the Kennedy School transforms insurgents into policymakers with global rolodexes and stylish double-breasted blue blazers. Harvard gets prestige; the revolutionaries get legitimacy. Everyone gets a photo-op.

Why we landed in Cambridge

But in my case and Alex “Babes” Flores’ — I have long suspected a more local logic. Sending us to Harvard was less about polishing our skills and more about temporarily exiling potential political rivals. After all, my last government assignment before grad-school was that of Minister Aquilino “Nene” Pimentel Jr.’s deputy minister replacing Marcos holdovers with hastily appointed OICs, some of whom were more enthusiastic than competent.

What better way to neutralize a politically inconvenient reformer than to ship him off to Cambridge, Massachusetts, a fellowship, a year’s stipend, the seductive illusion of meritocracy and bragging rights! And Babes may have stepped into the toes of several generals. A bemedaled colonel and a loyal participant in the winning side of EDSA I, we absorbed our lunchtime revolution seminars with missionary zeal. Alex would often declare — without irony — that if destiny required, he now knew exactly how to apply the arcana of regime change. Yet even in these spirited discussions, one haunting question etched itself into our collective consciousness: If you overthrow a regime and succeed - who runs the trains the morning after? That question separated dreamy revolutionaries from actual nation-builders. And should we fail this time, there’s always Primo Arambulo — our bow-tied, cigar-puffing Fil-Am contemporary, equal parts martinet and polymath, offering exile bed-spaces in his Maryland manor like a benevolent landlord of lost patriots.

When power meets the real world: cautionary tales

Our Cambridge experiences were not academic abstractions. They were foreshadowings. One fellow student — a charismatic politician from Ecuador — returned home, ascended to the presidency, then was promptly incarcerated for anomalies. Last we heard, he was exiled back to America, his presidency reduced to a cautionary footnote.

Another peer, an Islamic governor from Kaduna state in Nigeria, lived his Harvard years in polygamous splendor, each of his wives equipped with a BMW in the Peabody Terrace parking lot. On weekends he would jet off to London to play polo with Prince (now King) Charles.

These classmates were strictly nonrevolutionaries, yet their trajectories eerily mirror the beneficiaries of our present-day flood control corruption — men who have not yet endured a revolution but already behaving like survivors of one. Comfortable in their villas in Portugal, Paris and Forbes Park, they lounge as if the country’s suffering were events between chukkers or a Superbowl intermission.

Precondition to a PH upheaval

Which brings us to this week’s “trillion-peso march” and the question capturing our national imagination: Quo vadis, Filipinas? At the very least, such a mobilization should spark the swift jailing of senators, congressmen, bureaucrats, and the contractors who masterminded this grand heist — as a crucial build-up towards the tipping point.

In a country where the legal path to a China-style remedy — swift execution — or the North Korean custom of jailing relatives to the second degree of consanguinity is unavailable, the next best option is full restitution. Every peso stolen, every kilometer of asphalt overpriced, every Birkin and Gucci bag bought with public funds, every Rolex and Patek Philippe flaunted as trophies of impunity, the Gulfstream 350 and yes — because symbols matter — the Paraiba Tourmaline ring. All must be returned to the plundered nation.

These prescriptions are not academic indulgences. They arise from lived experience — from the hard lessons Babes, Primo and I absorbed at Harvard, listening to men and women who watched their countries implode and claw their way back. From them we learned a simple truth: Toppling a regime is easy; governing a nation is the real revolution. And regardless of how loud the streets become, the trains must still run the morning after.

The alternatives

The pathways ahead — constitutional, extra-constitutional, violent, nonviolent, reformist, dystopian, or merely farcical — will be dissected in my coming columns. Yet whatever form transition takes, any credible national program must contain one nonnegotiable proviso: systemic reforms. Not the cosmetic tinkering Congress peddles, but real structural correction — the very demands citizens have raised long before legislators perverted the process to protect themselves.

Foremost among these is the passage of a genuine anti-political dynasty law, not the pantomime version that conveniently exempts its authors. Equally vital is revising the 1987 Constitution, trading our dysfunctional unitary-presidential system for a parliamentary-federal model where accountability is unambiguous, incompetence rejected, and authority acquired by merit, not heredity — with dynasts firmly prohibited from steering the overhaul itself.

Only after the plebiscite’s ratification can Marcos and Sara depart — toward imprisonment or exile, at the people’s pleasure — carrying a sliver of dignity for having midwifed, by design or sheer accident, a more coherent constitutional order. And not before then! Nations do not rise because they shout the loudest, but because they choose the hard path when cowardice is easier. The trillion-peso march may ignite a reckoning, but reckoning alone does not shape destiny. Destiny is forged when a people, betrayed too often, finally decide that this time the thieves will not write the ending.

In the end, the question is no longer who falls, but who dares run the trains after the wreckage and who has the courage to rebuild a nation worthy of their arrival.