WHEN President Rodrigo Duterte began his war with the oligarchs while maintaining his close ties with many oligarchic clans and cliques, he betrayed not only the fundamental inconsistency in his actions, but also his sheer lack of familiarity with what oligarchy truly means.
A call was earliern made by elected politicians such as Sen. Franklin Drilon and by my fellow academics in the discipline, for the President to be consistent in his war against oligarchs and to take on the crusade against political dynasties. They argue that political dynasties enable oligarchy, in that the concentration of power in only a few families is its very backbone. They want the President, who is actually the patriarch of a dynasty, with all his children by his first wife serving in elected positions, to certify as urgent the proposed anti-dynasty bill, and finally enable what has been mandated in the 1987 Constitution but has yet to be enacted into law.
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