THE ART AND SCIENCE OF STARTING ALL OVER AGAIN

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

This week has been quite a ride. I had to be in Manila with my two sons, Gabe and Odon, to attend the wedding of another son, my namesake, from a previous relationship, whose mother passed away years ago due to illness which I ascribed to stresses and worries on account of her incarceration under the martial law regime.

The day after we arrived, my son brought us to her future wife’s family and I dutifully answered anticipated queries on my life story. I felt I had to assure them that despite the convulsions in my personal life decades before, I started all over again in Bohol and now I am living quite a normal life. Although they were civil about it, I knew I had to somehow erase possible worries that they might have  about my past and their daughter’s future as part of our family.

A day before the wedding, a Sigma Deltan, from a sorority allied with our fraternity, Upsilon Sigma Phi, during our student days at UP Los Banos, arranged lunch at a Makati Resto so I could meet three fraternity brothers whom I had not seen for half a century. Over a two-hour lunch, the topic was more on what happened to me from the time I disappeared from the campus in the late Sixties. They saw each other quite often after graduation and I sensed how close their families were since they maintained contact over the years and had no need to be in some kind of question-and-answer forum during lunch.  

During the wedding ceremony held at the chapel near what is called the Archbishop’s Palace in Mandaluyong and the reception at a restaurant called Lemuria at nearby Horseshoe Village, the overriding theme of the various events in which I participated was that of starting over again.

   

While on the plane back to Tagbilaran, in-between naps and exchanging smiles and occasional pleasantries with the pretty and heavily made up Air Asia stewardesses, I preoccupied the conscious and subconscious part of my brain with thoughts about what seemed to be the art and science of starting over again. I realized that this theme prosaically termed starting over  again is quite a dominant one in our personal and real life, in literature or sometimes in our own imagination.

Outside the routine of daily existence, this theme is elegantly packaged as, say, hope and redemption, death and resurrection, despair and triumph of the spirit, and so on. This theme of falling and rising each time we fall and similar admonitions from early childhood to old age, in the inevitable journey from birth to the end of mortal life, we are caught in what seems to be the Art and Science of Starting Over Again, presumably after we fall.

The Art aspect may refer to the unique ways we do it as in writing a poem and doing a painting; each one decides on how to start a new life from the ashes of our misfortunes, so to speak. Do we start another fire and do we collect the ashes and bury them so that we can have a symbolic gesture to begin a new Life? Indeed we start all over again in our own unique way.

The Science bit is how to do the basics of logic-based methodology of slaying the dragons of incomplete knowledge, misconceptions and subjectivism in defining new objectives and strategies as we mend the mental fences wreaked by miscalculation in our planning and in reading motives of friends and other relations involved somehow in our day-to-day decisions.

And so it came to pass as I went through the wedding ceremony as a father to the groom, whose visits to our place became fewer each year which was probably his assertion of independence, financial or emotional, half of my brain was processing the circumstances of our life together, its ups and downs, and the many starting overs we had to go through as we sought to define and re-define our respective roles as father and son through varying stages of growth and reflection and re-growth.

And so it came to pass as I narrated briefly during the wedding reception our story as father and son in the context of a people’s struggle against injustice and oppression and eventual liberation, at least in symbolic terms rather than in substance, half of my brain was processing the myths and phantoms of imagination we have pursued and discarded over the years characterized by countless starting overs, each time with a resolve to have a new lease in life despite previous downfall and misfortunes.

And so it came to pass as I answered queries regarding where I have been during the past half a century from highly-esteemed fraternity brothers Gerry Collado, Rey Villareal and Naz Racoma, whom I knew as college scholars during our UPLB days and are now distinguished alumni from Harvard, Rutgers, Cornell and AIM, half of my brain was processing the life and times of 33 of our generation, arrested, tortured and made to vanish from mortal existence to achieve immortality in the lives of those who continue to start the struggle all over again in the hills and slums and remote islands using digital tools of mass awareness and redemption from poverty and despair.

In-between those events related to family life and social affiliations, which have endured through decades of physical absence and non-Facebook existence,  I have subsisted on a mixed mental diet of news from both print and TV and it gave me a sense that this country after several administrations  run by the elite classes, is also going through a process of starting all over again.

The recent national election was framed in the popular imagination as a battle between good and evil. Which side you are on depends on which candidate you choose and not the party to which you belong.  

Indeed it’s democracy Philippine-style which is actually reflective of the cacique system, of landlordism, in the context of a modern capitalist state with landowners owning the means and tools of the new market place and have evolved  into lords of industry and political power while the poor remain poorer and multiply their kind so many times over year after year.

As in previous after-elections scenario, the elected Great Leader has proclaimed a new era of CHANGE in capital letters and portrayed himself as the knight in shining armor this time ready to charge the windmills of crime, illegal drug trade, corruption and incompetent governance.

This starting-over-again drama, however, has a new plot, interesting and creative in several respects:

-a President,  self-proclaimed leftist of a different hue but actually neither of both sides, committed to eliminating crimes and to decentralized governance through Federalism but showing dictatorial tendencies and also crude public behavior(perhaps only for appearances to appeal to macho psychology of the Filipinos, probably part of the Art of Starting Over Again, eh?) ;

-a Vice President, self-proclaimed pro-poor leader but without portfolio in an administration that is supposed to be pro-poor;

-a minority party of 3 members transforming itself as a majority coalition for change across diverse political persuasions signing up  more than 300 members in less than three weeks after election, which validates the view that our politics still revolves around personalities, feudal and dynastic lords actually, rather than principles and firm stand on issues;

-the party of the proletariat transforming itself as collaborator of the predominantly elite classes in a coalition of convenience to get better deals  in a global capitalist-driven economy for the benefit of bigger nations and their monopolist investors;

-the majority religions trying to gain moral leadership and political influence after harsh criticisms about some lapses indicating corrupt practices and moral lapses among some bishops and priests;

-the militant youth and labor sectors unable to mount credible opposition and expand their mass base to be an effective force for social transformation in Philippine society;

-the established mass media, particularly those in Metro Manila, being mocked almost from day to day by the President-elect as being tools of vested interests rather than a credible partner for nation-building;

-the social media now dominated by the more articulate and affluent among the youth who use irreverence, as well as weird syntax and language, to confuse their elders and attract attention to themselves in pursuit of the greater love of self; and

-the continuing practice to mix entertainment gossips and publicity stories with legitimate news in programs broadcast nation-wide followed by soap operas from 7.30 to 10.30 p.m. Monday to Friday to feed our voracious appetite with mostly romantic stories about love triangles and juvenile loves.

Now back to the scene of my son and his bride getting married in a Catholic ritual with a priest who now and then would interrupt in good humor recitation from a prepared script. At one point, he said he knew my son was not that religious but he should follow the counsel of the Church and those present in this most solemn of ceremony so he and his wife would remember Christ always and the need to love and serve Him.

There was no mention about the country and the poor but, I suppose, it was sort of given that you consecrate your marriage vows in the unspoken context of liberating the poor from the constraints of poverty and inequality. Otherwise, despite our privileges and entitlements, we will be distracted now and then by noise of protests and probably gunfire, in a country now on the eve of starting all over again in a never-ending cycle of hope, despair, redemption, despair, hope …

I now enjoin our teleserye nation to kneel and pray as we start all over again a new cycle of despair and  redemption -  hopefully with the real heroes and heroines winning in the end.

 For comments, email: npestelos@gmail.com

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NMP/24Jun2016/11.36 a.m.

Communication 101

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

I have assumed all along that politicians, as well as the rest of us who consider it our duty to comment on what they say, know the basics of communication as taught to us in college or, in the case probably of the majority, as learned from reading books on the subject or from the friendly advice of friends and colleagues in the work place.

It looks like this assumption is being proved wrong judging from the quality of discourse in public fora or in both the established and social media. I think it’s not due to lack of knowledge that these lessons get lost in delivery or in translation. It’s just that along the way we get carried away by our biases that we cannot be objective anymore in the way we evaluate messages thrown our way.

In most cases, our ego usually gets in the way of our listening to other people’s views, especially if they contradict our own. We insist on what we believe in and totally disregard the fact that others may hold views which we have also to respect and take into account.

I think most of us are familiar with the basic two-way communication process, the Source-Message-Channel-Receiver (SMCR) model with F for Feedback to complete it. I keep running through my brain the scenes from the past three weeks and I am still trying to reconcile what I have believed in all along about our responsibility as communicators.

J still cannot accept that sound bites can replace policy statements; rudeness can replace civil discourse; cursing can be done uncensored in public; and insults can replace civility in discussing serious matter of importance to the nation and in full view of an entire public and the world, including youth and children whom we have been teaching “good manner and right conduct” at home and school.

In so brief a time, we have displayed for all the world to see the worst in our party politics all because we have shelved conveniently our knowledge about Communication 101, if not our values as a nation with its proud history of heroic struggles against foreign invaders and local despots. In sound bites rather than in legitimate fora, verbal assaults were launched against the Catholic Church, journalists and the mass media, the United Nations and several allied countries with whom we have diplomatic relations and are sources of employment for millions of our workers and professionals.  

Pronouncements about the planned burial of a dictator at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, the possible appointment of his son to a Cabinet post, the release of a former President from hospital arrest, some prominent politicians accused of corruption from detention, all insult the memory of hundreds of families whose sons and daughters gave up their lives for the cause of freedom and democracy in our country.

Wrong source, wrong message, wrong channel. No less than UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon reacted quite strongly against the implied threat to the lives of Filipino journalists in a country with a high incidence of violence against media practitioners. On the other hand, none of the key political parties, including those in the so-called opposition, issued a statement on this turn of events in this country they always pledge to serve and make great again every election time. Instead, the whole nation witnessed a massive exodus to the so-called Coalition of Change led by the new party in power, which increased their ranks from 3 members to 350 in Congress in a matter of weeks.

The militant Marxist Left, if they are still called that way, joined the exodus enticed by the release of political prisoners and the promise to hold no less than four portfolios in the Cabinet. The Church wisely remained quiet when the new leader of the nation started rattling some skeletons in their closet which included the request for a Pajero from a President by a Bishop, etc.

Announcements about bounties which could amount to billions of pesos for the killing of drug lords and their pushers, in lieu impliedly of due process, did not merit any response from any human rights group. When the head of the Commission of Human Rights complained, he was promptly called an idiot by the President-elect which must have brought chill to many a spine among human rights groups.  

When people commented about this in the media, they were promptly labelled hypocrites by some of his followers. One of the avid fans even blamed the media for not being inspiring by reporting on such stuff or other negative events. It is conveniently forgotten it’s not the media who are acting weird and saying or doing outrageous stuff. They are merely reporting what is being said and done because that’s their role. Why indeed blame the messenger?

The source of the message in the communication process is critical in having a message noticed or given prominence and commented on by the public or the target receivers or audience. In all the media events of the past few weeks, the prominence of the source and his hard-earned 16 million votes have not been used to influence the quality of what is supposed to be a national dialogue between the party in power and the people. Everything seemed to be unplanned.

Everything depended on what would come out from the traditionally but often irritatingly foul mouth of the President-elect and to the surprise of many people, such mindless display of unplanned messages occurred with surprising regularity, something inexcusable if you are involving a credible source fresh from an overwhelming mandate from the people.

This inability to make use of an excellent source for opportunity messaging was a big letdown for the people who tenaciously supported him through the intense campaign characterized by a barrage of negative messages against the candidate who would be the President-elect a few days before election. These supporters persevered and survived it all only to be gifted by a demeaning performance from a potentially excellent source of relevant and inspiring messages on the eve of what has been billed as a period of change for our beloved country.

There was no indication that a team helped the President-elect to prepare core messages for each occasion that he had to talk during the three-week period after election. Normally a set of messages are selected for each type of audience all geared towards achieving an objective or what is called an “ effect.” Even ad libs could be planned.

What came across during the press conference and the other media events, was a President-elect quite arrogant and insensitive to the feelings of others. His off-the-cuff remarks might draw laughs but they depicted a person who wants to hear only his own voice and expects others to obey him. I agree with close friends who are among his rabid supporters that this public image projected by previous media events was not the real self of the the President-elect.

The other positive thing is that his staff seemed to have listened well to the negative feedbacks in both the established and social media. It was announced there would be no more press conferences and that he would “metamorphosed” into a more “presidentiable” personality. That took quite an enormous amount of humility to admit there was somehow some lapses in the management of previous events.

We look forward to new announcements starting July 1 after the installation of the Duterte Administration. We hope staff work will include the use of basic Communication 101 in moving towards creating the People’s Federal Republic of the Philippines, or whatever it will be called by the new regime under what looks like a rainbow coalition.

Hope it works. We pray it works.

Send comments to: npestelos@gmail.com ###

NMP/17 June 2016/1.41 p.m. 

Federalism Mon Amour

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

One mind-boggling development during recent weeks, prior to the installation of what has been promised  as a government of change, is the announced participation of the communist left headed by its leader, Jose Ma. Sison, in the incoming Duterte administration.

Neither the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), The National Democratic Front (NDF), nor the New People’s Army (NPA) has issued any statement to justify this move which effectively ranks them as part of the so-called Coalition for Change, an assortment of political parties of various shades and colors. Well, indeed, not unlike the proverbial rainbow.

From red to mixed colors seems to be an apt description for this rather unexpected transformation of the party of the proletariat to a united front of the country’s economic and political elites who have ruled the country since the first Republic under Emilio Aguinaldo.

In signing up as part of the Duterte regime the Left has taken the reformist path for which it has maligned the old Communist Party whose leaders were buried in oblivion by the Sison-led Mao Tse Tung-inspired movement starting in the late Sixties. Sison’s CPP has been invited by President-elect Duterte to name appointees for the departments of social welfare, labor, agrarian reform and environment and natural resources.

The President-elect attests the CPP has considerable experience in these sectors. To be sure, the CPP has sacrificed lives in efforts to achieve reforms in these areas.  

It look like both sides, the Government and the Left, are poised to announce the happy ending to more than 30 years of conflict. The involvement of the Left in the Duterte administration will necessarily end the protracted struggle against feudalism, bureaucrat-capitalism and imperialism, which the Left the basic problems of Philippine society.  

These are the key problems that any activist in the Sixties and Seventies would be ready to swear and scream against at the drop of a placard. Or die, if need be. Many actually died, most of them young, more as victims of their idealism and the massive recruitment of the Left to fight a war in which the young heroes of my generation were unprepared to wage.

Meanwhile, the nation waits with bated breath,  to use a cliché, for a justification from the Sison’s camp on why it is now shifting strategy from the armed struggle what it used to refer to as the parliamentary road.

It will be quite a stretch of the imagination to believe that the CPP will be allowed to engage in the armed struggle while its sympathizers and allies are running key departments of the Government. Nothing like it in the world, but it looks like everything has become possible under the new dispensation.

Many people believe that in aligning with the new Administration, Sison’s group is actually taking the smart move to revitalize its own ranks. In recent years, the movement has had to   contend with loss of prestige and credibility among the people on account of the misadventures of its military arm. It has also lost its appeal among the youth, who are preoccupied with other causes, definitely unrelated to the attainment of national democracy in the country.

It will be an unprincipled move if the left will join forces with the Duterte government simply because the President-elect was once a student of Professor Sison in San Beda. Surely there must be a more substantial reason other than this for abandoning a cause for which thousands of lives have been sacrificed and has caused untold miseries among families and local communities.

I assume that a significant number of the 16 million or so who voted for the President-elect would like also to hear from Sison and his fellow revolutionaries about their support to Federalism, one of the pillars of the Administration’s program aside from its announced policy to pay bounties to government-paid police and military for the arrest or shooting down of drug lords and pushers.

It will be good to know if the leaders of the communist Left think that feudalism, bureaucrat capitalism and imperialism can be more effectively done away with in decentralizing political and fiscal authority to component States or subnational levels of governance. I remember a UP student leader – I think his name was Samuel Tan from Diliman, getting a lot of attention and contrary opinion by opposing decentralization on the ground that it may actually reinforce the elites in their exercise of political and economic power.

He says the decentralized system will actually favor the elites because they do not have to contend with opposition on a national scale. In his analysis, the ruling elites can actually consolidate their hold on the country’s political and economic life by federalism which weakens rather than strengthens opposition to their rule and the abuses that usually accompany the exercise of almost absolute power politically and economically.

I will be interested to find out how Mr. Sison and the national democrats view Federalism in the context of the struggle against Feudalism, Bureucrat Capitalism and Imperialism. Their shift to parliamentary struggle will confirm the popular view that at this time and age, armed revolution cannot possibly win against massive State power bolstered by alliances with either Russia or the US, as well as with emerging superpower, China.

The emergence of terrorist groups with capacity to launch military attacks to do extensive  damage to what they perceive as enemy population groups and nation-states will further hamper efforts to mobilize support to national liberation and revolutionary forces. To achieve  much-needed structural reforms in Third World countries, which include the Philippines, will not be top priority among the superpowers who are involved in a war of attrition against terrorist groups.  

In our country,the question of the hour is: will Federalism be the way to go to effect radical changes that will result in meaningful agrarian reforms and in the process, create of more opportunities for education, employment, enterprise development and other components of equitable and sustainable human development among the less privileged sectors of society?

It is also timely to ask what type of Federalism will the Coalition for Change vote for that will fit our needs at this stage of the country’s development given basic structural problems and the challenges posed by illegal drug use, prevalence of crimes, a significant percentage of which are drug-related.

Let me now share with you some notes from Chapter 7 of the book, Driving Democracy, published by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government:

-Parliamentary republics and proportional electoral systems generate horizontal checks and balances in the core institutions of state. By contrast, federalism and decentralization lead towards vertical power-sharing among multiple layers of government.

-Contemporary debates about decentralized governance have arisen in many plural democracies, notably among the Francophone majority living in Quebec, the Basques in Spain, and the Scots in the UK.

These arguments have been particularly influential in fragile multinational states afflicted with deep-rooted civil wars where decentralization has been advocated as a potential constitutional solution aiming to reduce conflict, build peace, and protect the interests of marginalized communities.

Decentralization is understood as the devolution of power and responsibilities from the national to sub-national level.

-Federal constitutions which strengthen state’s rights and regional autonomy represent some of the most important strategies, as these safeguard some guaranteed areas of self-government for geographically-concentrated minorities.

Other common approaches include :

-devolution of powers to elected and non-elected regional and local government bodies; 

-shrinking the state through the privatization of public assets;

- private-public partnerships, and the contracting out of services to the non-profit and private sectors;

-delegation of central departmental responsibilities; and

-decision-making to local managers in field offices; and the use of traditional village councils or urban communities for consultation and planning processes.

Encouraged by international agencies, many industrialized and developing societies have been experimenting with these strategies.

-For example, the World Bank reports that in 1980, sub-national governments around the world collected on average 15% of revenues and spent 20% of expenditures. By the late-1990s, those figures had risen to 19% and 25%, respectively, and had even doubled in some regions and countries.

A comparison of trends in West European government during the last three decades noted a widespread shift from direct control and intervention by central government to more indirect control exercised primarily through regulation.

-Fiscal decentralization has expanded among most industrialized nations during the last three decades, notably with growing regional autonomy controlling taxation revenue and public expenditure in Spain and Belgium, but also in other nations such as France, Italy and Denmark.

- Proponents argue that decentralization has many potential advantages for bringing decisions closer to the community, for policy flexibility, innovation, and experimentation, and for ensuring government responsiveness to local needs.

-Nevertheless no consensus surrounds the impact of these reforms and the assumed benefits of this strategy have come under vigorous challenge. Skeptics charge that many of the theoretical claims advanced in favor of decentralized governance have not been sustained by careful empirical analysis.

- Indeed some have detected evidence of a backlash against this movement occurring in Western Europe, with some recentralization happening in the Netherlands and Sweden. Most seriously, far from maintaining stability and unity in multination states, critics argue that federalism and decentralization strategies risk the serious dangers of rigidifying community differences, encouraging partition or even succession and thus the ultimate break-up of fragile nation-states.

-Formal constitutional structures in all nations around the world are classified as ‘unitary states’, ‘federal states’, or an intermediate category of ‘hybrid unions’. Each of these categories can be further sub-divided according to the degree of decentralized governance, where fiscal, administrative, and political powers and functions are transferred to provincial and local levels.

I find these extracts from the Harvard paper extremely interesting. I hope the think tanks from the Cabinet and the PDP-Laban Party or the Coalition for Change have taken upon themselves to study what type of Federal arrangement best suits our country given its characteristic as multi-ethnic and  diverse religious faith, a land with well-defined majorities and specific minorities which will have to be taken into account in deciding the shift towards a more suitable type of Federalism and decentralization.

Indeed we may all love Federalism but we must avoid a “blind leading the blind” situation and fall into a sink-hole from which it will be difficult to claw our way back. The incoming Duterte Administration must provide leadership as it has promised to do o this vital component of its program for change.

Let us begin from determining where we are and making sure where we want to go and decide which type of Federalism can best help us in our quest for lasting peace and prosperity.. ###

NMP/10 June 2016/2.11 p.m.

More Notes and Feedbacks on Federalism

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

Probably like other Filipinos brought up in the tradition of civil discourse and liberal education, I am still reeling from the impact of having seen the President of my country behave like someone who have had too many in a gathering of fraternity brothers and sorority counterparts in one of those Friday night parties on the campus long ago.

No amount of admonition about understanding his behavior “ in context,” as his apologists would explain the morning after, which meant allowing him to express himself honestly by wolf whistling and cat-calling at a a lady reporter, can erase the bad impression created by this incident. In fact, it would have been easy understanding his misbehavior if he were drunk during that meeting and, hence, he was not in full control of what he was saying and doing.

I just hope that in future meetings, he will also think about us, his audience, rather than only  himself when he appears in a forum to answer serious questions from media practitioners about his policies and programs. He was voted into power to exercise leadership and not to provide entertainment by telling jokes and serenading lady reporters.

If he persists in this laid-back, informal style of conducting press conferences, it is possible his serious messages about corruption, illegal drug trade, good governance and the like will be lost in competition against the furor created by his personal antics and idiosyncrasies.  

One casualty in that press conference marred by disorganization, peripheral discussions and inadequate audio is a discussion on Federalism, the reason why a significant number of Filipinos voted him to power. Rightly or wrongly, Filipinos believe that among the candidates, the President-elect could be relied upon to provide strong leadership towards re-configuration of its governance institutions to address more effectively problems which have not been adequately attended to by previous administrations or, to view it another way, they missed seeing these problems in  terms of the inadequacy of the governance structure.

I am convinced that many Filipinos, including those who voted for President-elect Rodrigo Duterte, thirst for more information about Federalism, a subject which has been mentioned prominently during his campaign as a solution to the secessionist problem in Mindanao.

His place in history will be assured if Federalism will happen during his term. An article in Wikipedia documents his role in the advocacy for decentralization and Federalism also espoused by former UP President Jose Abueva and Senator Aquilino Pimentel.

A write-up in Wikepedia narrates:

“Beginning in late 2014, Davao City mayor Rodrigo Duterte launched a nationwide campaign promoting a charter change for federalism. During his visit to Cebu City in October of the same year, Duterte stated that federalism will facilitate better delivery of services to the people. He also saw the current system as ‘antiquated’ where distribution of public funds is disproportionately biased towards Manila.

“Aside from the economic aspect, federalism is also seen as the best means to address problems in Mindanao which suffers the most from ethnoreligious conflicts. He added that the current unitary form of government has not worked well given the ethnic diversity in the country.”

It’s unfortunate, however, that the President-elect has been devoting more time and efforts to explain if his wolf whistles are for sex or not  than to clarify the type and intricacies of federalism that is to be expected in his administration.

After our column last Sunday in this paper, we ran a series of posts on our Facebook page on the positive and negative aspects of federalism based on the experiences of Federal countries. The result was that while before, our posting would get responses from less than ten friends in the network, these posts yielded reactions from twice that number in less than a week.

These responses show the broad range of perceptions that people have on federalism. Let me cite a few here:

Tristan A. Catindig, fellow Upsilonian whom I have not seen for more than four decades, found the time to respond to what I wrote on FB:  

“Nes, I agree with you that the matter of whether we should or should not shift to a federal system of government (the "New System") is too important to leave to the politicians alone to decide. I believe, however, that the following preliminary questions should first be asked and answered by the proponents of the New System: (1) What problem(s) do we have that would require a shift to the New System? (2) What is the proof that we have such problem(s)? (3) Assuming that the problem(s) do exist, could not this problem(s) be solved in some other way that would be easier, faster, and cheaper (e.g., by amending the Local Government Code and devolving more powers to the local government units)?

“If the answer to the last question were a "no" then the proponents of the New System should now proceed to disclose to the public the details of the New System they have in mind (because there are a lot of variants). Creating a federal system of government is not going to be a walk in the park as there are a lot of pitfalls to avoid if such a system were to be successful in solving the problem(s) it is supposed to solve.”

Richard Prado, my kumpare who  was UNICEF head in Papua New Guinea and Mongolia and deputy representative in the People’s Republic of China, has this to say:

“You're absolutely correct, Pare . The transition to a federal system is not all about allocation of political powers but also about allocation of resources and other non-tangible factors such as ethno-cultural loyalty and religious faith even if our new Great Leader does not profess to the latter. Surely the subject of federalism demands the contribution of all who would like to continue to believe in one constitution.”

In another FB post, Richard writes: “As an advocate of decentralization, i believe we have the desire for federalization a long time ago. But should it necessarily be under a parliamentary system or under a more stable and more familiar presidential system?”

In an earlier post, he wonders: “Can we transit to a federal system within 6 years given the fact that we are faced with very delicate issues that we have not experienced and will not take the risk of experiencing? What a challenge indeed!”

Orlando B. Pabotoy, former Mayor of Cortes who holds the distinction of being the youngest Mayor in Bohol in the 1980s, writes from Fairfax, Virginia where he and his family have lived for decades:

“This is a tremendous task for all to take and begin with. Encourage full citizen participation to discuss from reestablishing a new constitution ascribing to a new form of government.

“Creating a new structure and building that framework of Government should not begin by election of representatives for the constitutional assembly who propose a constitution and submit (I should say rammed) it for the people to ratify it yes or no. The aspirations and sentiments of our people from the barangays ,towns, cities, districts, provinces and regions must be heard and listened to by the peoples' representatives and vice versa.

 “Otherwise we will be represented by someone whom we do not know and who doesn’t know us as a people or someone who does not know WHAT HE WILL BE DOING at all. Our existing laws do not have sufficient safeguards and punishment against corruption. Our courts have the pleasure of rendering decisions detrimental to the State abd favorable to a powerful corrupt senator for instance.

“We have now a venue for that discussion aside from community assemblies like what we are doing now. We will be surprised to hear from people we don't expect to have ideas to correct even legislative wrongs, diminish corruption in the government etc. The community has the idea and capacity to even do immediate solutions to their own local problems more so if it is strengthened by a system of governance that recognizes and enhances that capacity instead of taking it away from them.

 “The National Government only exists for the good and general welfare of all its people. Very sad to say that since our Independence our Government officials are very keen for the Benevolence first and foremost to themselves. THEIR MOTTO goes " What are we in power for" Our people should not allow this kind of attitude to continue. PHILIPPINES TAKE THIS CHANCE THE RIGHT WAY!!!”

Maria Duncan, a  friend and retired teacher who travels a lot abroad and articulates now and then her opinions on matters affecting the home country, has this to say: “Deeply concerning, but worth the try! Who knows? We may rise to the challenge, still!”

Dr. Charles G . Kick III, a UP Los Banos alumnus who now lives in the Pacific with his Filipina wife and family, has this suggestion:

“When the RP's Senate was devised, the 0.1% told us that they wanted it because it was what the Americans did. Wrong, they wanted it because that's what the Romans did. The Roman Senate was comprised almost entirely of Roman residents--almost no one from any of its provinces became a Senator. That centralized things where the 0.1% could control them. 

“The US Senate, on the other hand, is comprised of members from each State (more or less the same as the RP's regions). The very least change towards federalism would be to change the way that Senators are elected in the Philippines by having the winning candidate in each region becoming a member rather than the top vote getters nationwide.”

Al Palomar, a noted literary critic and editor who has lived in Norman, Oklahoma for decades, has this to say: “ First and foremost, we have to improve our education system. Ignorance is the root of all evil. Our people deserve the kind of politicians they choose to elect. Our politicians don't want to educate our people because their success depends upon the ignorance of the electorate.”

Rodolfo C. Kintanar,  former classmate at the Asian Institute of Management, writes: “I am in Davao City now Nes to attend to the needs of the Davao School for the Blind when I read your discussion about Federalism. With Duterte advocating Federalism there is a big chance we will go into that path.

Let me end here for lack of space. All these responses will be enough to convince the Duterte

Cabinet to devote a little more time to discuss  details about the type of Federalism that they will propose for the country, a more substantial topic to discuss rather than the shades of meaning that a Presidential wolf whistle conveys.  ###

NMP/03 June 2016/10.24 p.m.