Rice shortage, a divide and rule stratagem

As an ordinary player in the students’ movement that was characterized as the first quarter storm, I came across some quotable quotes of the wise and of the zany, as well. We injected them into our teach-ins hoping to strengthen the philosophical foundation of our cause. One such quote came to mind recently. “Divide and rule”, my peers claimed, formed part of the military strategies written in Mao Tse Tung’s Red Book, although, to confess, I never came close to reading the book myself. Anyway, we thought that when government agencies parlayed it as propaganda, it was designed to confuse and divide us such that when our ranks were disarrayed or rocked with dissentions, they would employ such force to strike us and achieve their objective of ruling over us.

Paradoxically, a friend of mine from that combative era of our youth, saw me recently. Our old bodies could no longer sustain our then exuberance but our curious minds, well, that’s something else.

For some reason, this friend said that he could very well remember the regime of the late Pres. Ferdinand E. Marcos. To him, it was tame, in many regards, compared to the present administration of Her Excellency, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. I was somewhat swayed by his presentation after recognizing the facts my friends cited. And so let me share with you what I learned.

Divide and rule, whether consciously resorted to or just conveniently used, is very much a tool of the incumbent president as it was in the lamented period of Pres. Marcos. Here and today, it is a stratagem of diversion and division employed to its cruelest. As a diversion, it lures away our collective inquisitive thoughts from looking into what could have been a more explosive corruption issue – the swine scam. As a division, it seeks to promote the existence of opinions on many topics if only to break our people into several fragments of more manageable pockets of dissent.

Indeed, the evolving issue, now tagged as swine scam, appeared to be the worse pillage of public funds. Ironically, it apparently stemmed from the report of the Commission on Audit, a constitutional body. It must be noted however, that the news story could not be specific about how the alleged fund, amounting to more than three billion pesos and legally designed as government support to the swine industry, was placed at the disposal of favored politicians during the 2007 elections. Neither could these sacred cows be identified because the documents to support the money transfers were not made public.

Before the nation could start to look in the COA report, “divide and rule” came in. Secretary of Agriculture Arthur Yap, startled the country by saying that food sellers, in Metro Manila, should give less rice to their customers than usual. His approach was benign. In invoking our sense of thriftiness, he cautioned us that failing to heed his counsel, we would continue with our wasteful ways and in the end, endure the shortage of rice. Yet, while benign, the message was clear. There was, to him, the rice czar of our country, an impending crisis in the availability of rice.

Even before Sec. Yap’s saliva dried, Malacañang took the other stand for no other explicable reason than to divide our thoughts. Its barrage of news releases confused us because according to the palace and certainly contrary to the view of Sec. Yap, rice shortage was not in the horizon. The Office of the President asserted that there was no lack of the supply of the staple seen in the near future.

To add to our confusion, Malacañang announced that it would channel its abundant rice thru local government units and the Catholic church. Yet, the queues of people desiring to buy their daily requirement continued to lengthen. If there was rice, where? How come we had nothing to buy?

Amid all these facts, we had to argue against ourselves. Is there really a short supply of rice? Before we put any attempt of an answer, we need to know why all these scenes and after scrutinizing our minds, we, I am afraid, conclude that this rice shortage is but a divide and rule stratagem.

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