Thoughts on the Sona
GOVERNMENT executives reporting to their constituents the situation in their jurisdictions within a certain time frame do not usually talk about negative things. The reason is obvious: leaders won’t paint themselves as losers. This makes such reports like President Rodrigo Duterte’s State of the Nation Address (Sona) on Monday a one-sided coin. It cannot be objective.
The same goes to reactions by the political opposition or by the government’s critics. They see the work of government executives and the developments in their jurisdictions through a different prism. Their job is to make government executives look bad and so they downplay achievements and play up the failings. Their assessments, therefore are one-sided coins of the opposite kind.
Objectivity is difficult to mine especially in a polarized setup. Indeed, there is only one truth, but in a setup like ours now, government officials peddle to the people their version of the “truth” while the opposition and critics peddle the opposite version. That is why it is good to be conscious of this reality.
One should therefore approach the President’s Sona and the reactions to it next week this way. Unfortunately, the people themselves have also been polarized. They don’t listen to the Sona and the reactions to it with open mind. Duterte partisans will swallow hook, line and sinker what the President will say while those aligned with the political opposition and the government’s critics won’t believe it.
Even then, our advice is for the people to stick to what is ideal: be open-minded while listening to everything that would be said on Monday. Don’t wallow in fanaticism. Not everything that happened to the country since the Duterte administration took over is good in much the same way that not everything is bad.
Rituals like the Sona, however, are often more about form than on substance (the reason why the President hired a movie director as consultant for the speech’s presentation). But don’t be fooled by it. The product is more important than the way it is wrapped. An objective assessment would help the government push forward with what it did right and correct what it did wrong.