Duterte and the hard state
While I had voted for President Duterte in 2016, I confess that I wasn’t much of a fan in his first year in office, reaching a point of possible “buyer’s remorse.”
To my mind, he didn’t do much in his first year, which was just full of bombastic, populist promises: end “endo,” free irrigation, increase in SSS pensions, free cavan of rice, etc. While his war against drugs was on point, the way he went about it was over the top, applying pure brute force to a complex problem, and costing the country in terms of international reputation.
I also thought he was naïve in entering into peace talks with the CPP- NDF, even to the point of appointing known Red activists in his Cabinet. He also failed to confront the oligarchy in his first year. How could he?
For example, he appointed a former Globe executive to head the Department of Information and Communications Technology. It
I’m glad that there’s a President Duterte version 2.0.
was like appointing a fox to guard the hen house. He also did nothing for agriculture and instead appointed Manny Piñol as Secretary of Agriculture. Pinol’s main policy is to continue former Agriculture Secretary Prospero Alcala’s failed rice self-sufficiency policy.
THE PRESIDENT HAS EVOLVED
However, I’m glad that there’s a President Duterte version 2.0. The man has clearly evolved in office. Perhaps, attribute the evolution to his humility about his intellectual capacity (“it took me 7 years to finish high school.”) but he has shown a capacity to learn and change course.
For example, while he initially bought into Piñol’s bankrupt rice self-sufficiency policy, President Duterte later backed Cabinet Secretary Jun Evasco’s more enlightened policy to liberalize rice importation and reform the National Food Authority. That the NFA with the help of the rice syndicate is now trying to create a rice crisis to avoid being “reformed” is beside the point. The administration is officially backing legislation to remove NFA’s legal monopoly on rice importation.
There are more examples: President Duterte has allowed the hard leftists in his Cabinet not to be confirmed for office and has junked the peace talks. He fired Atty. Salalima from office and appointed a competent and honest former general as DICT OIC. (I hope former Gen. Eliseo Rio Jr. will be made permanent.) He has reached out of his small circle of Davao friends and San Beda law classmates to staff the government and has been appointing more professionals ( mostly exmilitary) to sensitive positions. He has tempered his populist impulses. In fact, he has stopped short of fully implementing a jobkilling end “endo” policy. Further, it was legislators, and not him, who pushed for the populist free SUC (State Universities and Colleges) tuition.
Even on the drug war, he has learned. He has relaunched Operation Tokhang as “Tokhang Lite,” without the headline- grabbing EJKs ( Extra Judicial Killings), which was seen as the substance of his drug war policy.
My benign, if not positive, view of the actions of President Duterte version 2.0 is that he’s trying to develop a “strong” or “hard” state.
DUTERTE MOVES AGAINST THE OLIGARCHY
In developmental literature, a hard state is one which can raise
substantial revenues, provide basic services, keep law and order, and impose public policy over narrow private interests.
It’s with this prism that I view the tax reform law or TRAIN (Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion). While a few have criticized TRAIN as being anti-poor because of the increased taxes and the mild inflationary effects, I see it as a big step toward a harder or stronger state. The version that finally passed may have been diluted somewhat by the legislators, but the fact is that the administration pushed for it, despite objections of powerful private interests such as car manufacturers, sugar producers, beverage and food manufacturers, and leftist groups. The ability to impose taxes is a hallmark of a strong state.
TRAIN isn’t the only instance where President Duterte has shown political will about the state’s financial prerogatives vis a vis private interests.
He has managed to collect Php 6 billion from Lucio Tan’s Philippine Airlines, representing unpaid navigational charges, a debt previous administrations have failed to collect. He has retaken
the Mile Long Property from the Prietos, previous owners of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
Recently, he forced PLDT Chairman Manny Pangilinan to surrender telecom frequencies to the government at no cost after threatening to send tax auditors to look over PLDT’s books. Those frequencies are public property and while PLDT may have paid CURE (Connectivity Unlimited Resources Enterprises) for those frequencies, CURE obtained them without paying for them.
More bitter to PLDT, the administration intends to hand over those frequencies to a third telco player which will compete with the existing duopoly.
To try to strengthen the state, President Duterte has been attacking what he perceives to be threats to the state. One threat is the drug syndicates with their creeping influence over local, and even national, government officials and police authorities. This is the reason for his drug war. The other threats are from extremists, the first from ISIS-backed local Islamic terrorists and the second, from the CPP-NPA. On the latter, he has done a 180-degree turn.
From consorting with the communists (which he admitted started when he was Davao mayor and playing local politics), he has scrapped the peace talks, ordered the re- arrest of NDF “consultants,” and instructed the military to go on an all- out war against the NPA.
However, a skeptic told me that a significant amount of TRAIN’s revenues will go to pay for increases in military and police pay. I retorted that it’s just being consistent with Duterte’s objective to strengthen the state by strengthening its capacity to vanquish the state’s enemies.