The Duterte-Discaya legacy

During my early days as a political analyst, I was asked by Tito Boy Abunda about my thoughts on then outgoing President Benigno Aquino III’s final State of the Nation Address. On one hand, I found the speech beautifully written and well-structured. It was a swan song that efficiently tallied his administration’s manifold achievements against all odds. And the claims were broadly credible and technocratically appealing—devoid of characteristic hyperbole and performativity of similar speech acts by other world leaders.

Nevertheless, I did take issue with the outgoing president’s decision to curate his entire speech around the shortcomings and infamies of his predecessor from half a decade earlier. “We have indeed come so far. And, in order for us to appreciate just how far we have traveled, let us recall where we started,” Aquino began his swan song, then proceeded with his opprobrium of the Gloria Macapagal Arroyo presidency.

He dismissed and belittled the macro-economic achievements of his predecessor, who also happened to be Aquino’s economics professor: Mass emigration. Pitiful foreign direct investment inflows. Concentrated growth. Ballooning debt. He also highlighted the litany of anomalies, most notably the fertilizer scandal, NBN-ZTE scandal, and, above all, the “Hello, Garci” scandal. The Arroyo administration’s evils, according to Aquino, were culpable for the country’s multidimensional crisis: “From the start, we already knew that corruption was the root of all our people’s suffering. Thus, our battle cry: where there is no corruption, there will be no poverty.”

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Elections are won through poetry, but power is maintained through prose. In Aquino’s case, I felt he never went past the poetry. In spite of all the technocratic language, his administration’s main mantra lacked a transcendental state-building quality. As a social scientist, I took issue with the profoundly resonant but misleadingly simplistic claim that “corruption alone” explained all the country’s ills.

Corruption was always more of a symptom of a deeper structural crisis, namely the combination of bad economics (leaving us no robust manufacturing base nor robust regulation of oligarchs) and an ill-designed constitutional order (leaving the bulk of elected offices to political dynasties). Notwithstanding its appeal, the problem with “moralpolitik” is how it sidelines more realistic solutions to nuanced problems.

I would rather have had him set the tone for his successors—and lay out a vision of a new and reenergized Philippines. I instinctively revolted against this approach, because I feared a return to a more medieval cyclical “history” of Niccolo Machiavelli at the expense of embracing the more modern, dialectically progressive history of G. W. F. Hegel. Then came the oriental despot! A viciously opportunistic political entrepreneur, mayor-President Rodrigo Duterte, weaponized retrospective-cum-grievance politics to cast doubt on the legitimacy not only of his predecessor, but also of the entire post-martial law democratic order.

Day after day, Duterte, his impresarios, and troll farms bombarded the public with supposed evidence of Aquino era corruption and crime. All of a sudden, the “liberals” were not only to blame for the country’s underdevelopment, but they were also placed in the same “enemy of the nation” category as “oligarchs,” “communists,” and “drug lords.” The upshot was a new era of “hyper-impunity”: namely, the systematic evisceration of institutional checks and balances, deadly intimidation of all potential political rivals, and mass extrajudicial killings in the name of law and order.

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This opened the floodgates for a “corruption on steroids” era, with bogus contractors such as the Discayas bagging P12 billion in government projects in Duterte’s first year in office alone! And this was precisely the beginning of our current flood control catastrophe. When thousands of drug suspects were killed with impunity, and the highest-level independent-minded officials seamlessly deposed and jailed on trumped-up charges, political dynasties and grifters wasted no chance to juice the country’s treasury, which had expanded massively thanks to Aquino-era reforms. It’s classic “path dependency.” Without the Duterte presidency, there wouldn’t have been the Discaya empire of corruption and the trillion-peso flood control scandal!

The Marcos Jr. administration—itself a product of the Duterte-led UniTeam—should be held accountable for historic corruption levels in recent years. Culpable Cabinet members and close allies need to be held accountable. But perhaps the incumbent can also learn from how Aquino tied his legacy to cleansing the country of the crimes of an immediate predecessor lest both his post-presidency fate and that of the nation would be imperiled.

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richard.heydarian@inquirer.net