The Federal State of Visayas circa 1898

A couple of months ago, a group of Professors of Political Science from Iloilo City led by Atty. Leopoldo Causing, chairman of the West Visayas State University (WVSU), wrote me a letter and sent me a 28-page "Notes on the Parliamentary System of Government" which is a study on the pros and cons of a parliamentary system vis-a-vis our present presidential system. Prof. Causing sent me a note asking me to study this system… which he believes if coupled with a federal system… might just be the answer to our country’s call for better governance.

Last weekend, a good friend of mine, Dr. Jose Dacudao, who used to work at the Vicente Sotto Medical Center (VSMC) in Cebu City and has since moved to Butuan City (he is the only brain surgeon there) dropped by my office and asked me about the notes and addresses of the Iloilo professors so he could meet with them. So I gave him the addresses since he was going to Iloilo from Cebu City. Dr. Dacudao is no politician, but he is one busy person, organizing groups advocating for the preservation of indigenous cultures and languages. He introduced and brought me to that Internet organization called Defenders of Indigenous Languages in the Archipelago (DILA). He believes this can only be done if the country shifts to a federal form of government.

In Iloilo City, Dr. Dacudao met with Prof. Leopoldo Causing of the WVSU and in fact, he rang me up and finally, I was able to talk to the professor. Yes, as we wrote before, I again emphasized to our Ilonggo friends that while we’re sold to the federal system, we were not fully convinced with a parliamentary one, unless we had one that was strictly a two-party system. But Prof. Causing was very open-minded and concurred that a two-party parliamentary system was a better idea… after all, we’ve already witnessed how the present multi-party system has given us politicians devoid of any real ideology.

We’ve written about the preservation of our languages many times in this corner and let me tell you that if there’s any commonality with the people in the Visayas, we’re all in favor of removing the subject Tagalog a.k.a. Pilipino from the curriculum because as Dr. Dacudao would say, "Forcing us to learn Pilipino destroys our other languages and it is economically useless especially to our overseas Filipino workers (OFWs)." Well, let me add my own, that Pilipino as it is being taught in our schools today is merely a dialect of the Tagalog language because it is actually 99.9 percent Tagalog.

I have heard many sad stories of people from Cebu, Negros or Panay applying for a job and not getting the position simply because the questionnaire was in Tagalog. Clearly, this is disadvantageous to us who were not born in that tongue. Hence, the quick fix to this problem is to adopt a federal form of government so that each individual states can assure the preservation of their respective cultures by teaching their kids in the tongue they were born.

If you didn’t know, the concept of a federal state pre-dates even the time of Apolinario Mabini, the "Brains of the Katipunan" wherein he envisioned a Philippines broken into three states of Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao. I really don’t know why our Department of Education (DepEd) doesn’t teach this? Didn’t they make a research on the life of the Sublime Paralytic?

In his book The War Against the Americans 1899-1906 written by Resil B. Mojares, he wrote that on Dec.17, 1898, the Federal State of the Visayas was established in Jaro… a mere four days before the Treaty of Paris was signed between the United States and Spain, wherein Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States. There’s no doubt that during our struggle for freedom, one of the plans of our forefathers at the turn of the century was already to establish a federal form of government. If the Ilonggos then were ready to embrace a federal state and went into the motion to established one… it just makes me wonder why the people in the North would say that we’re not ready for a federal system? Yes, better believe that you can still hear people say that we are not yet ready for a federal system of government!

If you want to know why the Ilonggos established a federal state in the Visayas, it was because they regarded Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo as a dictator. In fact, Cebu or most of the Visayas were not even represented in the Malolos Congress, but as historian Resil Mojares indicated, both Gen. Arcadio Maxilom and Juan Climaco placed themselves under the authority of Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, but apparently, the Ilonggos didn’t want to be under him. Perhaps they were more "pro-Bonifacio" at that time. But this is something that Ilonggos ought to be proud of… that they established a federal state of the Visayas before the Americans took over the Philippines!

Anyway, last Monday night, I also met another Ilonggo, the honorable Francis "Wan Tan" Palanca, the top Councilor in the City of Victorias who is the secretary general of the Philippine Councilors League in Region 6 and we also talked about the same issues I’ve been writing about. On March 21st, there will be a convention of the Philippine Councilors League in Cebu City and hopefully, we can have resolutions supporting the use of our native tongues in education and more importantly, support the move towards federalism.

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Still on the subject of federalism. We wrote here some weeks ago that people who believed in this concept, like Sen. John "Sonny" Osmena or his brother Lito Osmena didn’t really have any position paper on a federal government. Sure, there are many documents, periodicals or books about federalism, but none that they can say is their position paper.

A week ago, the Regional Development Council (RDC-7) took the cudgels for them to do a comprehensive study on this system of governance and through the Development Administration Committee (Dev-Ad) headed by Msgr. Roberto Alesna, who created an ad-hoc body for this specific task through research by the University of San Carlos (USC) ably represented by Political Science Prof. Ricky Poca. So let’s all help to achieve this goal, which is what is known as… nation-building.

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.thefreeman.com. He also hosts a weekly talkshow entitled, "Straight from the Sky" shown every Monday only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 on SkyCable at 8 p.m.