Duterte the revolutionary: Not RevGov but RevPres

IN the front pages of newspapers this week, the call for a revolutionary government (RevGov) threatened to dislodge Covid-19 from the headlines. In social media, President Rodrigo Roa Duterte’s shock troops, the Duterte Diehard Supporters or DDS, echoed this challenge. While the Deegong himself “…shunned calls for the establishment of a revolutionary government, saying he has nothing to do with it” (The Manila Times, Aug. 26, 2020). He issued this statement after the Mayor Rodrigo Roa Duterte-National Executive Coordinating Committee, or MRRD-NECC, led by a discredited nondescript politician, met at the Clark Freeport. This group is a remnant of those that campaigned for PRRD in 2016, probably left out in the division of spoils. By now PRRD must have already distributed sinecures, leaving crumbs for those in the fringes.

In 2017, a year into his regime, PRRD must have realized the magnitude of the nation’s predicaments and his incapability to wade through the morass fortified only by a provincial mindset, albeit fashioned out of his successful experience as the mayor of a major city. The enormity of engaging problems on the national sphere — especially his preferred fields of expertise, illegal drugs and bureaucratic corruption — require a certain sophistication not provided by a successful though limited street crimes and corruption experience of three decades as a local executive. Going through the democratic process and adhering to the rule of law was proving to be cumbersome work for Davao’s erstwhile action man. And on the national and international public domain, the opposition supported by the formal mass media held the high ground. The temptation to cut corners to eradicate illegal drugs — preventing the country’s slide into a narcostate — must have been overpowering. And he did take short cuts. His international image was in tatters with his war against drugs metamorphosing into a human rights embarrassment — while catching the attention of the International Criminal Court.