A new brand of leadership for the Philippines

It is well and good to project Duterte as the nation’s father when he delivers his third state of the nation address. But I think he is more than a father. He has introduced us to a new kind of leadership in the Philippines as Lee Kuan Yew did to Singapore. He never buckled down from a good fight despite all attempts to picture him as an evil human rights violator by a host of those who do not want the Philippines to move forward.

There is the US government which has been used to treating us as a colonial people easy to bend according to their wishes. We are a convenient puppet to assert their hegemony in our region against a growing China.

Some authorities of the Catholic Church who persist in their medieval role as a rival of the state. (The prime actor for this is Soc Villegas who wants to be another Cardinal Sin even if Edsa was a failure). The bunch of liberals and oligarchs who have become wealthy on the backs of poor people is the front of the opposition in odd but convenient partnership with the longest existing communist group in our region. While communist parties especially in Europe have discarded armed struggle they have not, resorting to banditry to tax businesses in provinces. These by the way is the assortment. Wouldn’t you be angry? Wouldn’t you tell it like it is?

If he is a father to the nation he has to be one who is strict and able to impart his strength and purpose to the Filipino nation. Since he became president he has been true to himself and purpose. He has been successful in persuading Filipinos to take part in nation building as no president ever had.

You can’t soft talk your way to do that. I wonder how the film director working with Malacañang to direct the president will be able to work out the persona of father of the nation role with his natural spontaneous character that jibes with the crude language of the masa that connected him to them. It will not be an easy job.

“They wanted me to show the manner how he addresses the nation. They wanted the audience to know how he will speak as mayor, as a father and as President,” Joyce Bernal the speech director said.

In the audience will be the usual groups in rallies and protest action with the intent of blocking Duterte’s reforms. Instead of joining the cocktails for guests he went and talked to the protesters without fear and the nightmare of security. No president before him ever did that.

His character is his shield against any attempt to return to what the French revolution called “the ancien regime.” It was the political and social system of the kingdom of France from the Late Middle Ages (circa 15th century) until 1789, when hereditary monarchy and the feudal system of French nobility were abolished by the French Revolution. We have a similar “ancien regime” as the old order in Philippine society. It has to go.

Polite but meaningless language read from a written speech belongs to that old order. If we are trying to create a new order this is one of the things that we have to discard. The speech director has a difficult job to do – how to project the president with a new brand of leadership, how to assert substance before fripperies.

Duterte had a benefactor who was not present – the previous president, Noynoy Aquino III. It was his dismal government that made Filipinos decide – enough is enough. His litany of offences embraced all that government should not be. This more than ever pushed Filipinos to elect the mayor of Davao to be president. He was the complete opposite of Noynoy Aquino. His allies now are responsible for getting him into office – sectors of the American government, of the Catholic Church, the Liberal Party, the oligarchy personified by the Aquino-Lopez as it had been when we had the Marcos-Lopez partnership and the perennial NDF Coalition of Jose Maria Sison’s Communist Party, liberation theology followers from religious orders and some priests. The whole caboodle. They want to oust Duterte and return Aquino to power. That is what we are up against, for a change a new beginning against the old order when Filipino masses were shut out, the people enjoined by the Constitution.

How will the speech director embrace all that in a State of the Nation message? How will she meld the character of this leader and the persona that he exemplified? Difficult. The challenge includes nuances hard to articulate but these will be present even when we simplify it to its bare message that we should change our society in deference to our heroes who died for their love of our country.