Bad change
THE recent Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean)-China Ministerial Meeting has shown how awkward the country’s recent position is in relation to the longdrawn conflict in the South China Sea. In just a year, we have gone from battling China on the legal front and world opinion to being its apologist—like Cambodia is.
It hasn’t been long since we celebrated the United Nations arbitral tribunal ruling that favored us in the territorial dispute with China over the West Philippine Sea. Now, we are deliberately downplaying that legal triumph even as other countries in the region like Vietnam and Indonesia are using that ruling to advance their own claims over the disputed South China Sea territories.
Nowhere was this more visible than in the ministerial meeting. Like in the past, Asean struggled to find a unified stand on China’s assertion of its 9-dash line that staked a claim to a wide swathe of territory in the South China Sea. Like in the past, it could not come up with a strongly worded statement in the midst of China’s island-building spree in disputed territories.
What is different is that were before we have taken the lead in putting China to task for its actions, we have become its defenders, again like Cambodia.
I have pointed this in previous columns. Our kind of representative democracy can be both a boon and a bane for us. Having elections every three years is a good practice but having new sets of officials (every three years for local officials, every six years for the president and senators) is bad for the continuity of programs and projects.
One need not go far in looking for an example on this. Cebu City’s Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project was conceived a decade ago and thankfully survived changes of mayors, from Tomas Osmeña to Michael Rama and back. This was because both Osmeña and Rama were proBRT. What has threatened the implementation of the project, however, is the change of presidents—and of underlings.
Who would have thought that Rodrigo Duterte would replace Benigno Aquino at the helm? Duterte is of totally different temperament from Aquino. And who would have thought that Duterte would appoint as presidential assistant for the Visayas businessman Michael Dino, a man victimized by Osmeña’s quarrelsome tendencies? Osmeña had blocked Dino’s project in Banilad because he hated Dino’s partner at that time, former governor Gwen Garcia.
Now it looks like the BRT has gone out of favor while Dino’s light rail transit (LRT) and subway proposal is the “flavor” of the Duterte administration.
It would have been good if the country has a clear and long-term program to deal with China’s designs on the South China Sea, as our country’s shameful change of stance on the territorial dispute would not have been done. On this, we should be reminded that China is being led by a communist party whose leaders normally rule for many years, even decades. This means it could see through long-term programs and projects.
Of course, the democratic setup is still better. But we should come up with mechanisms that would ensure that programs and projects would have a certain degree of continuity.