By Mickel Ollave and Joy Aceron*
Analyzing the national significance of the recent Palawan plebiscite from an insider-outsider perspective, Mike Ollave and Joy Aceron, in this piece, contends that the Palawan plebiscite post positive implications on the country and its citizen movements. The Palawan plebiscite shows that top-down agenda initiated by the powerful can still be defeated by mostly citizen resistance below. The Palawan election proves a clean peaceful democratic electoral exercise remains feasible even amidst the pandemic. An electoral exercise can still be issue-based and an opportunity for the powerful to be held to account.
Overall, huge reasons to be worried and disappointed about, with little positive to hold on to.
In the Philippines, party-switching means nothing. It is as normal for politicians as changing clothes. It is more regular than legislators attending congressional hearings.
If we are to elect Duterte to the presidency, we must first ask ourselves: how different is present-day Philippines from Davao City of the 1980s?
For "Daang Matuwid" to be sustained, expanded and deepened, good governance has to become a norm; good governance practices must become common, not mere islands and best practices up for awards. Political party reforms, Freedom of Information (FoI) and the anti-dynasty law are mechanisms that will make "Daang Matuwid" a norm that will bring about change that can be felt by ordinary citizens.
There could be times when instead of speaking truth to power, an accountability mechanism becomes a tool of the powerful to constrain governance
We have advanced on so many governance reforms under the current administration, the reform of the most basic requirement of democracy, elections, continues to lag behind.
An administration’s reform-mindedness or reform-orientation will be determined by its demonstrated commitment to reforming the ways by which power in government is constituted, with the elections being the most basic formal mechanism to give and enable such power.
While generally peaceful and credible, there are setbacks in the conduct of the 2013 elections that require attention.
The weakness of parties vis-à-vis personalities and families has a lot of ill-effects on democracy. One of the more serious problems it causes has something to do with making accountability in the exercise of power precarious and extremely difficult. Personalities and families operate in private spaces that are away from the public eye, hence are protected from public scrutiny or any accountability checks. Abuse of power and sheer bad, ill-informed decisions of politicians involving matters of national importance are at the heart of bad governance in the country, which makes accountability one of the biggest pre-requisites of governance and political reform.
Our premise why dynasties are problematic in democracy is it undermines accountability since decisions that affect the public are made in private sphere (the family). Hence, our working definition of political dynasty is it exists when members of a (nuclear) family occupies seats that have direct mandate to check and balance each other and have legal authority over other means of accountability. It is a state of political monopoly that cancels out checks and balance mechanisms.
Paradoxically, the Maguindanao Massacre gives the country a unique opportunity to address a long-time problem that was not a monopoly of one region or ethnic community. With this massacre, we crossed the line and the country is now on the brink of being a failed state. With this massacre, we are seeing a scale of brutality and evil that we have not seen before. We have seen political and media assassinations and we have experienced massacres of farmers and workers – but not with these targets (women, lawyers, journalists, bystanders and passersby) and not in these numbers. Lines were crossed in Maguindanao and we must all work together, and work very hard, to pull the country back from those lines. Otherwise, the consequences are unimaginable with political clans all over the country possibly believing that they too can act with impunity.