Life after elective office

CEBU CITY, Philippines — “There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind,” C.S. Lewis once wrote.

The thought ought to inspire our incumbent and former elected government officials, elections being just 20 months away, to come up with plans for a graceful exit.

Integral development in the Philippines has been slow, largely due to the lack of capable new leaders in elected office. This in turn is an artificial scarcity resulting from the repetitive candidacies of thousands of leaders who run and by hook or by crook win the votes needed to keep themselves in power for a long, long time.

Term limits are effectively ineffective because flouting the spirit of the law, politicos simply run again for the same position after, say, a term following their last lawful one.

Often, it can seem as if they never left. When they do not run, they field their spouses, children, or other relatives.

And as they and their families move in and out of the halls of power, problems persist in their constituencies, rendered perpetual because the “politi-clans” on the whole spend more energy consolidating their interests and those of their parties, with an eye to the next round of voting in three or six years, than genuinely serving in the here and now.

Some people argue that even the politician has to earn his keep and therefore must not be blamed for having a career plan.

But it is one thing to pursue a career in line with what the Constitution stipulates and another to work from the silences of basic law to circumvent it. Not everything lawful is good. Just because one can run again after some time does not mean one must. Just because one may remain in the corridors of power by proxies such as husbands or wives does not mean doing so is beneficial.

Good people know when it is time to lead and when it is time to step aside.

In Cebu City, the performance of elected leaders regardless of party affiliation over the last quarter of a century is a dismal failure. Flooding, water shortage, and waste mismanagement continue to worsen. The city hospital is approaching its fourteenth year of progress into a white elephant. Residents have developed an almost daily ritual of stressing one another through traffic and subhuman commuting conditions, but the city government’s intervention to ease motorist and commuter life is sadly, hardly felt.

The lack of positive change justifies the call for zero voting for any incumbent or former elected official in 2028. All of them have had their collective turn for at least 25 years but they have done little for us to surmount our most pressing obstacles to real development. They have to go.

Good people are not those who do not fail but those who have the humility to admit that they have not been up to the task, that they must make way for others — not their relatives — who have fresh ideas, new energy, and resistance to power addiction and power play, to stand for election and be chosen.

Others argue that the bottom line is that voters keep putting old faces back in power so that in the end their institutionalization is but a natural feature rather than a defect of democracy.

But therein lies the bug. Voters pick from among the usual candidates precisely because they refuse to step aside, as if, their good deeds notwithstanding, they have not by commission or omission harmed their constituency long enough.

Criticism of the late president Corazon Aquino aside and bracketing out her brother-in-law, the late senator Agapito Aquino who successfully ran for the Senate a year after her oath-taking, she whom the Constitution did not bar from running for a second term left the presidency in 1992 as if the law retroactively applied to her, as if her restoration of a republican and democratic system, keeping it intact for over six years, did not comprise a huge feat on which she could have built a reelection campaign.

In her person, we see someone with, on balance, an inspiring and positive effect on Philippine history who went a step further and renounced power when doing otherwise would have been aboveboard. Other former presidents pale. We know what positions the presidents of Juetengate, the “Hello, Garci” scandal, and the atrocious drug war ran for after their time as heads of state ran out (in the case of the Juetengate president, after he received pardon for plunder from the “Hello, Garci” president).

A whole crop of current and former elected officials outside the presidency pale, too. If they — under whose watches cities, towns, provinces, and the nation remained stagnant — cannot be shamed into refraining from running again, we must take matters into our own hands and grow the movement to deprive them of any vote in 2028.

If they are humble and wise, they will realize that they have a life after elective office. There is no shortage of former leaders who continued to serve even outside elective posts. Citizen Cory, former president, for starters, served in various non-profit organizations, including her very own, which formed young people for leadership. She subsequently used her moral ascendancy to lead the resistance to sinister attempts at charter change under all her successors, remaining a force for freedom until she died in 2009.

A nation benefits not when we have more of the same officials over and over again but when leaders, national or local, grow up and respect the democratic dynamic, empowering others instead of monopolizing power. That includes stepping aside cleanly, respecting term limits in letter and spirit, in favor of a better breed of leaders. When few and the same characters guzzle power, they contract that cancer that goes by the name corruption and reduce people’s lives into an agonizing series of outages.

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