Federalism: a thought
SOMEBODY recently asked me about my stand on the federalism push by the Duterte administration. No offense meant to my idol, former senator Aquilino Pimentel Jr., who is one of those spearheading the campaign, but my answer to that is the same as my answer to the question of whether it is good to amend the 1987 Constitution. Now is simply not the time.
The push for federalism and amending the constitution are actually like Siamese twins. You cannot have a federal setup without amending the constitution. And I don’t think it would be good to do both at this time.
I have said this before and I will point it out again: the 1987 Constitution is the product of what can be considered the most glorious period of the country, the 1986 Edsa people power uprising. When then President Corazon Aquino formed the Constitutional Commission that cobbled together the charter, progressive ideas still blanketed the country’s leadership. That’s why the provision creating the Commission on Human Rights is in the constitution, for example.
The pendulum has shifted to almost the extreme right now, an almost opposite setup from the one prevailing immediately after Edsa. Consider human rights. It has become the fashion now among the country’s leaders to denigrate those rights and instead extoll the “virtues” of riding roughshod over those rights to achieve a desired end, which in this case is winning the war against drugs.
Good if those chosen to represent us in the task of amending the constitution are imbued with high (sorry, but all I think now is House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez—I shudder at the thought people like him are the ones who will represent us). But no, maybe there’s a better time to do that.
The same goes with the federalism push. Who are dominating the political setup now? Despite the president’s previous rants against oligarchs, the fact remains that the current dispensation has become dependent on their support to the point of helping in their rehabilitation and the strengthening of their hold on their turfs. The best example of that are the Marcoses.
While the federalism concept is good, it simply is bad when applied to the current situation. We will only end up creating little kingdoms upon which the current political oligarchs and political dynasties would rule for eons. Reminds me of the title of one of the movies of Fernando Poe Jr.: “Sa Iyo ang Tondo, sa Kanya ang Cavite.” For the federalists, the title could be: “Sa Iyo ang Ilocos, sa Kanya ang Davao,” and so on and so forth.
Besides, it could worsen the economic imbalance that is currently prevailing involving major urban centers and the backward areas that are largely rural. In that setup, Metro Manila would still be the most powerful federal state. A Central Visayas state meanwhile, would surely be largely dominated by Cebu. And how could, say, the Muslim areas stand as a state considering the backwardness of the region?
On this, I agree with the suggestion of Australian professor Paul Hutchcroft in a recent forum, which is for the government to strengthen first the regions before plunging into a federalist setup.