Can't We Learn to Go Beyond the Who's?:

Suffrage in the Context

of Democratic Governance

WHEN JOYDEE Robledo and I, as a writing-editing tandem, were the Opinion-Editorial Department of Sun*Star News Service (SNS), we prepared a network editorial for use by the Sun*Star nationwide group of publications. The editorial’s message was reflected in its title: "The Nation Divides the House to Choose Who’d Unite Us."

At that time we were also the core team of the synergism-oriented SanibLakas Foundation, and we carried that editorial, as well, in one of the issues of the foundation’s fortnightly semi-internal journal, Sanib-Sinag.

Nation ‘Divides the House’

top

The editorial, carried by Sun*Star publications on Election Day of 1998, went this way:

"The democratic direction is towards increasing National Synergy, not towards further division. However, overzealous partisanship has served to divide, to divide further, and to divide permanently. No one wins this way; the entire Filipino Nation loses.

"If it were clearly a contest between the preservation of dictatorial rule and the chance for democratic change, a high degree of partisanship would be quite understandable, in fact even legitimate, like during the Snap Elections of February 1986. But in a contest where there are many candidates who are basically of the same mold, and differ in the view of the various voters only in personality or in personal connections, rabid hostility is out of place among mature voters.

"The Filipino is worth dying for, all right, but is your politician really worth quarreling about? Why break families, why even break friendships and peace in the neighborhood over contending politicians? These may likely become political-convenience allies just months or even weeks after publicly slashing at each other’s throats! They may even all flock together in the new political coalition to be put by whoever will win! So, these politicians would have shaken hands, all-smiles, before cameras while their fans (short for fanatics) would still be quarreling, over them.

"Let’s discuss, even debate, and convince one another, but quarreling, like cheating, will only destroy whatever we have built up in our sense of nationhood or what has remained of it."

The editorial ends with its sharp assertion and an appeal for statesmanship among voters:

"Politicians are not worth quarreling about!

"Think about it. Campaign and vote for the nation."

Synergy in Democratic Governance

top

Democracy is the synergy of wills of self-actualized human individuals. Premises for this include humans being conscious of their dignity and rights and asserting these individually and collectively through effective mechanisms for such assertion and administered by their chosen servant-leader administrators.

In healthy democracies, individual members of the human communities, as various scopes of constituency, consciously and voluntarily synergize their total humanity – their human bodies, their human minds and their human spirit. Minus any of these three, the reality of living democracy is greatly diminished.

There can be no real democracy if the people behave like slaves, not thinking for themselves, not making fully-informed decisions especially on how the synergy would best serve the rights of all based on the will of the majority, with due compassion and care for the specific legitimate interests of all the component groups, especially the special groups that are of the minority by reason of non-choiceful circumstances.

Synergy of will, collated and consolidated from an effective synergy of minds through a healthy process, should translate into a consensus of what the whole community should do at any given period. For the national community this would be the national long-range plan that should serve this entire community and its citizens fully.

For smaller component communities, whether territorially-defined or otherwise, there should be equivalent long-range plans. Actually, the plans of these smaller-scope constituencies should be the ones synergized as the basis of the national plan (contrary to what has become the pattern, the national plan should not be based on the order list of foreign creditor institutions as it has been usual practice!).

Ultimately, real democracy is based on the development and assertion of the will of individual citizens in homes and neighborhoods and villages.

Human intellect should afford working out short-term goals with clear indicators for success so that the goals would not be recycled repeatedly as hollow promises.

The process of working out these long-term and short-term plans must be fully and effectively participatory. No exclusions, no token participation passed of as a real synergy of all or almost-all the minds. This should be an earnest collective effort to search for the truths that will set us free from ignorance and from the separation that mires us all in the conflicts among narrow interests. In contention are here should be the bits of knowledge, analyses, insights and opinions of people, not a contest among persons who carry these bits of knowledge, analyses, insights and opinions as their very own.

The execution of the plans needs the synergy of actions of human bodies, the creativity of human minds and the enthusiasm of the human spirit. The best plan we can come up with collectively deserves to have a realistically effective plan of collective implementation, where groups and individuals would have clearly defined roles to play.

Choosing people for posts 

top

An important part of the implementation plan is choosing who would play which roles in the task of all to implement that plan.

Choosing specifically which individuals would do the overall orchestrating, which individuals would do the very specific planning, and who would lead in implementing the plans, whether by election or by appointment, is definitely an important component of democracy. This is why elections are very important direct acts of the people in a working democracy.

But if all the citizens are just in this focus, if all that the citizens do is to compare among reputations of persons presenting themselves for the various tasks, if all we do is blame all our woes on one reelectionist candidate or be hysterically afraid of what one of the challengers would do if he wins, democracy cannot be a reality.

It has become our habit as voters to compare among candidates on the basis their character reputations or even their minor misdeeds. For example, in asessing the performance of the late President-turned-dictator Ferdinand Marcos, we carry the belief that the volume of his alleged plunder accounts for the big impoverishment of our national economy, and fail to see that the much bigger adverse consequences of his approval of projects, programs and policies dictated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

For another example, we see only the clean personal integrity of ex-President Corazon Aquino, and fail to see that her policy position on debt repayment (to repay all the debts of the illegal regime of Marcos, without asking for even just moratoriums on these and cancellation of the clearly illegal and onerous ones). This policy has been the biggest single factor underpinning our annually growing government budget deficits and our plunging peso-dollar exchange rates. On her other acts, including ones that bordered on the treasonous (like her reported long-distance phone conversation with then Executive Secretary Joker Arroyo shpwing knowledge and complicity with the U.S. Embassy’s meddling in the work of the 1986 Constitutional Commission) I do not impute malice, either, but simply lack of good advice.

The point is that the voters should start looking into policies and programs promoted by the candidates. I remember that for the 2001 elections environmental groups organized an "electoral college" to evaluate the senatorial candidates of the administration and of the opposition, the organizers were saying that candidates of the just-deposed President Joseph Estrada could not score high in the evaluation (their inclusion in the evaluation was actually an afterthought) precisely because they were associated with Estrada who was a "gambler, drunkard and womanizer."

While it is absolutely true that everything is interrelated in the seamless cosmic reality, that sort of criteria would have been more suited for a voter’s guide from the Moral Recovery Program. Ironically, that "green electoral college" favored the candidates of the then newly-installed President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who, as senator, had led the drive for the ratification by the Philippine Senate of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade or GATT, which multilateral treaty has wreaked havoc on the Philippine and global environment! At least she was not reputed to be "a "gambler, drunkard and womanizer." Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!

The people should unite on the what’s before they can responsively and productively unite on the who’s. Or choose our who’s on the basis of the what’s they credibly espouse.

Elections in parliamentary systems are done that way. The parliament can be dissolved upon a big national issue and a new one is created when the people choose their equivalent of congressional district representatives according to party affiliations which imply clear positions on the issue. That way the people themselves are directly voting on that issue.

The problem with our situation here in the Philippines has always been that the major political parties are basically identical, and our candidates are generally mum on real issues, on policy and platform issues. They would rather dance, sing, or do acrobatics like the "EDSA-I Ramos Leap," and engage in character-assassination, but generally shy away from taking the issues by the horns.

And then our voters have had the habit of reelecting proven liars, candidates with recycled broken promises and recycled excuses for dismal performance, because these candidates convincingly appear winnable. We tend to favor fighting cocks that are llamado, which is why outgoing President Aquino chose to anoint Defense Sec. Fidel V. Ramos, her late husband’s jailer, over ex-Speaker Ramon Mitra Jr., her late husband’s cell-mate, and why outgoing President Ramos chose to anoint Speaker Jose de Venecia over his own protégé, former Defense Sec. Renato de Villa.

We have apparently lost all devotion to the value of truth and integrity. We have actually been gamblers not voters. And we admit it with amusement or even some sense of pride.

We should not limit our democratic right and duty to choosing which politician we would predictably be blaming later, specifically at the time of the next election period. But are we not doing precisely that? Can’t we break free from this impotent, even harmful, cycle that we dare to claim as "democracy"?

Can’t we make democracy work or at least personally behave during elections in a way the next generations would have reason to hold us in admiration and gratitude instead of holding us in contempt?

Planning to fail… again? 

top

We should not be planning to remain in the cycle of blaming this candidate, fearing another, and voting for the "lesser evil," over and over again for decades on end. Or, much less, betting on the winnable.

We should be planning instead on programs and policies that we need to implement with determination to really solve the problems of the nation. Remember: Failure to plan means planning to fail. Failure to plan together and failing to plan to implement together mean planning to fail in the attempt to succeed together, in the attempt to be served and exalted together. Failure to consider the long-term problems of the country in search for really effective solutions, and just electing someone hopefully to be our "national redeemer" only to be crucified later, is not an exercise in democracy.

On those points I dare not attempt to improve on these words from my esteemed friend and colleague in the Academe, Prof. Nito Doria of the Social Research Center of the University of Sto. Tomas, who says in his introduction to an SRC-designed Seminar on Development Administration:

"If it is not yet too late, it ought to dawn on every concerned citizen, especially those in charge of social governance, that the failures of government that have now become an unenviable tradition cannot simply be blamed on those identified as trouble-makers, or as a result of widespread graft and corruption, but the result of no less than a systemic dysfunction in Philippine society. The need for a rational and systematic analysis of old notions and societal configurations, especially those that have come to be regarded without question as venerable institutions, in order to craft a strategy for national progress that will not require generations to take effect, itf this country is not to be overtaken by the development of more unwelcome and debilitating events.

"A meaningful strategy is simply impossible without a critical review of such institution whose analogy in the provate sector are the standing policies that determine, for better or worse, the inner culture of an enterprise." (underscoring in the original)

Of course we can be forced by circumstances to choose the "lesser evil" among candidates. But we can’t fool ourselves forever that in so doing we are voting in the context of real democratic system.

Because real democracy should have the capability to unite us behind plans, policies and programs, and also behind appropriate orchestrators, appropriate servant-leaders for these. It appears that we are not marching toward that sort of system.

In fact, because of the level of despicable corruption among politicians and voters alike, military officers in various groupings are increasingly being tempted to use this to justify their own grab for the power that Marcos had given them the taste of.

If commanded discipline were all that this nation needs, I would even consider suporting a slide back to such dictatorship. But considering everything, especially the essence, dignity and inherent capabilities of human beings who deserve to be actualized and synergized in a system of governance that befits humans. Humans are evolved beings that do not deserve to slide back to the logic and morality of reptiles.

Rule of Law in Human Civilization 

top

Resorting to martial law, coups d’etat, and similar measures would be beneath the level of the self-actualizing human person of evolved civilization who would prefer to uphold the force of logic instead of the logic of force. Even if this were civilian-backed, political power emanating from the advantage of one group or the other in having control of killing machines is not exactly an indicator of a much-evolved human civilization.

But naivete and hysterical self-righteousness can really cloud the otherwise lucid sensibilities of even our best-schooled intellectuals, especially if the military factor is not obvious in a political transition that negates a legitimate election.

The military factor can be hidden behind a thick cloak of legitimacy in overturning a landslide election result, especially if there is a conspicuous civilian backing for a military rebellion and the one installed in power is not a military personality.

This happened in 2001, with the chief-of-staff of the armed forces simply walking away from his sworn duty to be loyal to the Constitutionally-recognized commander-in-chief almost a full day before the Supreme Court chief justice swore in the vice president as the new commander-in-chief, thus creating a clear hiatus in civilian supremacy over the military, no less than a breaching of the life of the Republic with neither accountability nor even admission.

For this reason, historical accounts should be complete and accurate to answer definitively for the sake of affording cold objectivity for the opinion leaders of future generations, when they recall the twelve yes-no questions submitted to the Supreme Court – which the latter refused to answer – and when they try to provide historically-accurate answers for these, free as they will be from the emotions and recriminations and threats that tend to silence present-day thinkers.

It may turn out to be the task of future generations to collectively assert that, indeed, the outspokenly honest child was right after all, the emperor really had no clothes!

It has become a historical fact of public record that a lawyer named Alan Paguia submitted those simple yes-no questions to the High Tribunal under the leadership of Chief Justice Hilario Davide, who had earlier presided over the unconsummated impeachment trial of President Joseph Estrada and later personally swore-in Vice President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to the presidency.

As of this writing, neither the Supreme Court as a body, nor any of its member-justices, has presented answers to these questions. What they did was to penalize the lawyer with suspension from practising his profession for asking these questions in the first place. But latter-day compositions of the High Tribunal, or the Filipino people led by intellectually honest opinion leaders, may eventually give straightforward answers that may not at all be very pleasing to the incumbent justices and their beneficiary politicians, and may possibly tend to shame these persons’ respective descendants.

At the risk of venom or harm coming upon me, and with the intent only of serving the cause of accurate historical reckoning and of truthfully responsible – albeit delayed – public recognition, I dare enumerate Paguia’s questions here, for latter-day objective consideration by impartial scholars:

1. Is it true that the law strictly prohibits judges or justices from participating in partisan political activities?

2. Is it true that Your Honors participated in a partisan political activity during Vice President Arroyo’s oathtaking at Edsa on Jan. 20, 2001?

3. Is it true that Your Honors attended and authorized the Arroyo oathtaking in Your Honors’ official capacity as judicial officers?

4. Is it true that the basic law involved in this controversy is Article VII, Section 8 of the Constitution (Four grounds for succession of the Vice President to the Office of the President.)

5. Is it true that the sole constitutional ground invoked by the Vice President for her oathtaking as President was "permanent disability"?

6. Is it true that Your Honors authorized the oathtaking at Edsa on that same ground of "permanent disability"?

7. Is it true that Chief Justice Davide administered the oathtaking at Edsa on that same ground of "permanent disability"?

8. Is it true that Your Honors unquestioningly accepted the Vice President’s allegation of "permanent disability"?

9. Is it true that the "administrative matter" of administering the oath at Edsa by the Chief Justice involved the performance of an official duty, which ought to be consistent with the Constitution?

10. Is it true that there was never any proof of compliance with constitutional requirements regarding the said "permanent disability"?

11. Is it true that Your Honors later rejected the ground of "permanent disability" and replaced it with "resignation," even as President Estrada never wrote any resignation letter?

12. Is it true that due process of law absolutely requires the "cold neutrality of an impartial judge" both in appearance and in substance, without which the proceedings are rendered void and without legal effect from the beginning?

My enumeration here of Alan Paguia’s questions can never be sanely construed as an act of "forum shopping" or an attempt to reopen for judicial review the legality of the Arroyo presidency. It is an appeal directed at the people themselves, now or at whatever time in the future, to seek the truth from facts and render a historical judgment for the enlightenment of our descendants.

The May 2004 elections will render any ardent wish for judicial reversal on this matter moot and academic. My appeal is for accuracy in its final historical accounting. Let the future generation redeem the intellectuals of the present one from the shame of compromising with truth for practical political considerations.

Why am I focusing on this matter at all, knowing that it will soon be moot and academic? Because it tends to give a very distrurbing lesson to the Filipino voter on his odyssey: a landslide electoral victory can very easily be overturned by enough people allowing the rule of law to be flagrantly set aside, upon the partisan passions of the few millions of people, against the electoral verdict of tens of millions of voters.

Without the rule of law consistently upheld, all efforts to level the playing field during campaigns, all efforts to safeguard the ballot, all efforts to keep the count clean are very easily rendered utterly pointless.

Edsa-II Message: ‘Suffrage is Pointless’ 

top

Present-day efforts to "educate" the masses on the value of the right to suffrage and their duty to use it wisely are rendered inutile by the message of Edsa-Dos, the process whereby the intellectual elite arrogated upon itself the prerogative to "correct" the landslide vote of the "ignorant masses" in the 1998 presidential elections. And the impoverished Filipino, comprising the majority of the voters of this country, saw their landslide triumph being obliterated by the gods riding shining chariots, and are now saying, "inilagay namin sa pwesto, inalis ninyo!" (we put someone in the presidency, you removed him) and adding, "bakit pa kami boboto uli?" (why are we going to vote ever again?)

It was a milestone for the typical Filipino voter, who comes from the ranks of the masa, to celebrate the first-ever time they won, where the candidate was their choice and the affluent just eventually accepted to support. That was one of the historical highlights in the last part of the Sun*Star News Service post-mortem analysis of the 1998 elections. Edsa-II perfunctorily "corrected" that milestone in a crude mob-rule manner with a quiet coup d’etat led by the AFP chief of staff, but passed off as a legitimate exercise of people power.

Intellectually-honest lawyers and professors in law schools have been soul-searching and are having serious difficulties in answering these and similar questions from their confused students:

1. In responding to the needs of the immediate moment the Supreme Court considered it to be in the people’s interest to proclaim as legitimate succession the assumption of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to the presidency. But without going into the prudence of that judgment’s content, what would be the logical effects on the stability of the rule of law in this country? A sitting president was removed from office by an unconsummated impeachment trial, after it was pronounced guilty by mammoth crowds massed up in Metro Manila and other cities. But does the 1987 Philippine Constitution provide for such a process as a valid verdict from massed-up millions? Did not the Supreme Court, perhaps inadvertently, allow a very consequential violation of a basic Constitutional right to "presumption of innocence until found guilty without reasonable doubt by a competent court"? Has people power been quietly legislated into the fundamental law to constitute a competent court? Wouldn’t that development institutionalize "lynch-mob" justice and officially end the rule of law?

2. How about the matter of admitting as evidence a newspaper clipping of a person’s diary (that of the former executive secretary) to conclude another person’s state of mind (that then President Estrada was seriously considering to resign and, that therefore, in effect already legally resigned)? Wouldn’t this be a dangerous precedent from jurisprudence in the Estrada case? Can inferior courts now conclude from newspaper clippings and unsworn diaries of third persons in trying their cases, following the High Tribunal’s pragmatic example?

3. How about suffrage? How can the constitutionally-guaranteed exercise of suffrage to produce an election winner be voided by the combined action of the military and uncounted civilians, including Catholic school students way below voting age, who wouldn’t even more honestly call their act a rebellion and instead insist that it was just a Constitutional succession? The Martial Law Constitution of 1973 was ratified by a mere show of hands at government-organized rallies. We rejected the claimed legitimacy of that supposed ratification because those who were at the rallies were not even proven to be voters and more so because the raised hands were not even counted and proved to represent even just a plurality of anything.

4. When can Filipino civilians unseat a president that they don’t like, without depending on the military?

5. And still about the military, how come the military top brass could simply turn their backs on an incumbent commander-in-chief who was to be replaced not earlier than the day after, without having to declare or admit a rebellion and without having to face the court martial for insubordination? Can the military brass completely and permanently deny having mounted a rebellion just because that rebellion won? What would be the lasting effects of that action and that impunity on the sense of discipline of the entire military establishment?

6. Most importantly, how well do the country’s intelligentsia, academe and media understand what is going on in the hearts and minds of the impoverished but largely-silent majority? To say that the followers of Estrada are all ignorant and illogical is to be ignorant and illogical, and to say they were all mercenaries is a seriously fantastic oversimplification. Does the supposed "brain" understand the rest of the body, let alone the bigger but silent part of that body?

This set of questions was first aired in a talk by my beloved friend, esteemed colleague in the Academe, and Lambat-Liwanag chairperson Dr. Noemi Alindogan-Medina that challenged academicians, especially historians, to record accurately and address fully.

This time around, many the self-righteously unrepentant intellectuals of the elite are passing judgment on the majority of the voters as "still ignorant" and needing "voter education," totally ignorant as these intellectuals are of the great disservice they had dealt the nation and its adherence to the rule of law by their arrogance and impatience about it all.

In time, the majority of the Filipino voters, whose 1998 vote they took the liberty to "correct" in 2001, would become politically mature enough to forgive them, for they knew not what they were doing. In the meantime these self-appointed guardians of morality in politics would do well to think twice or even thrice before they go on, with their usual air of unfounded certainty, pontificating on criteria of worthy candidates, etc., and condescending the organic wisdom of the masa.

They whould be reminded that when they were chanting to brand a certain lady senator a "pok-pok" (prostitute) because she danced briefly in triumph in a tension-filled moment during the impeachment trial; or when they made an issue of another senator’s allegedly deviant gender preferences, or when they were broadcasting short-message texts of unverified accusations passed off as fist-hand knowledge over their cell phones, they were not exactly proving any great measure of moral or intellectual superiority over their less-schooled compatriots.

Stand for Democracy! 

top

Let us strive for democracy, but only for real democracy, which is the productive and beneficial synergy of the human bodies, human minds and human spirit of all for the interests of all. Let us be shorn of all partisan snobbishness and personality-oriented biases, so we can all be worthy advocates and beneficiaries of democracy, of the rule of law and of human equality, dignity and harmony.

That way, we can extricate ourselves from the ridiculous situation with two warring camps of "democracy-lovers": one partisan camp self-righteously calling upon us all to "defend" democracy while the other partisan camp self-righteously calls for us to fight to "restore" it.

Democracy has to be a synergy of all human social and natural capabilities to address all human needs in every big and small community, where the bigger-scope communities are synergies of smaller-scope communities, all the way to the family and the individual human.

The people’s self-empowerment process through the "magical" application of the principle of synergism is the only way the people can be empowered. Not by proxy empowerment whereby an entity seeks the people’s help to capture and consolidate political power and promise to exercise such power consistently in the service of the people’s "objective class interests," earnestness assumed. Neither by token empowerment whereby an entity already in power grants bits of high-publicity seats of participation in decision-making processes to representatives of the people but making sure to protect its own narrow interests from being really disturbed by such representatives.

Only the people’s direct self-empowerment can work to establish real democracy.

In the words of Prof. Doria: "If progress is to be shared and enjoyed by all, then it must be the achievement of all, the result of concerted effort of a responsible citizenry to make progress a way of life for the nation; not the result of some singular heroic effort of some exceptional individual who does not exist except in myth.

"A responsible citizenry, however, is just a concert of responsible individual citizens liberated, informed and empowered, and made responsible for their own welfare, It must necessarily be in that sequence of development, for one cannot expect to make a responsible citizen out of one who remains un-liberated, un-informed and un-empowered.

"A strategy for national progress must be an exhilarating liberating factor in the nation’s life, one that will free the Filipinos from the disquiet and listlessness generated by failed models of dogmata that have shackled their mind for centuries and in evitably made them dependent on and beholden to the patronage of oppressive power.

"Such a strategy can be no less than a new conceptual scheme, no less than what Thomas Kuhn in a landmark dissertation, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, refers to as a ‘paradigm shift.’ "

If I may add a paraphrase of what I state in the previous section, "failure to have such a strategy has been our consistent strategy for failure."

And I bring in Albert Einstein, describing insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting to get a different result. We cannot possibly solve problems with the same thinking we had when we created them."

And we have the tendency to limit voter education to discernment of criteria for public officials and respective qualities of candidates! This has been going on for decades, and has not at all served the cause of democracy!

Let us stand and work in earnest for real living democracy and strongly abhor all the cheap circuses that claim to carry its name.