Things Duterte has done for the country, where his predecessors did not dare do

The 2017 was the first full year of  Rodrigo Roa Duterte as President of the republic.

The mayor from Davao made drastic moves that would not only make a change but a political suicide, but not President Rodrigo Duterte. At the end of the year, he still remains and enjoys high ratings based from the surveys.

Manila Times resident columnist Mr. Rigoberto Tiglao wrote an article titled “Dogmas Duterte demolished in 2017” last January 3,2018, where he has enumerated the trailblazing moves that made Duterte a Duterte – the President who has energized the country with own style of leadership.

The past and current President's of the country, from left, Estrada, Arroyo,Duterte, Ramos, and Aquino (photo credit to owner) 

We have quoted some of the paragraphs from Mr. Tiglao’s article for the convenience of our reading public.

First, Duterte demolished the dogma that a Philippine president and the Republic should consider the United States as its big white brother, that its national interests are our national interests. In our post-war history. Cory Aquino, her anointed, the West Point-trained Fidel Ramos, and her son Benigno III were totally subservient to the US, while the other two just paid lip service to the policy of undertaking an independent foreign policy.

He has managed to change Filipinos’ centuries-old anti-Chinese bias, with the nation now looking at China as its main trade partner and the funder for its much-needed infrastructure projects.

Part of the love-America dogma was that no president would remain popular—and would become ripe for overthrow—if he crossed the US overlords. The reasoning was that—in sharp contrast to our neighbors— probably nearly all of middle- and upper-class Filipinos have relatives who migrated to the US (or its sister country, Canada). Most of the masses on the other hand still dream of migrating to that land of milk and honey.

Duterte broke that myth, with his popularity even surging to a record 69 percent of Filipinos (based on the latest December polls) satisfied with his rule, a rise from his 65 percent grade when he assumed office in June 2016.     *

Second, Duterte broke the dogma that was the Spanish colonizers’ main tool for occupying a country which allowed them to deploy only a minimal military force: That the Catholic Church was God’s representative on earth, and rulers and the ruled must do what it says.

Duterte obviously has survived the Church’s war vs Duterte. The Church’s field marshal for this war, Archbishop Socrates Villegas—who saw Duterte as the Marcos that he, the new Cardinal Sin, would topple—is drifting to political oblivion and has even lost his main post as president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines. I can’t even remember the last press release of the moralistic churchgoers’ group, the pretentiously-named National Transformation Council. Its last posting on its official Facebook page was an article last month lifted from some crappy website about Duterte telling NDF consultants to surrender.


Third, Duterte has shattered the dogma that no Philippine president would get elected to the post, and survive for long without—or resist the bribery of—the oligarchy. His two main rivals to the presidency were heavily bankrolled by national oligarchs, competing for which of their factions would get their puppet to win. Duterte had only Davao-level rich businessmen to finance his campaign.  *


Duterte in 2017 collected the unpaid taxes of Mighty Corp., the country’s second biggest cigarette manufacturer which had grown through all of the past post-war presidents. Think of “10 percent” of the taxes collected—P30 billion—and one would get a realistic idea of the billions of reasons why this tobacco oligarch survived all of the past presidencies. Think in the same way about the P6 billion the Duterte administration collected in unpaid navigational fees from Philippine Airlines, owned by once-powerful oligarch Lucio Tan.


Fourth, Duterte destroyed the dogma of the invincibility of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, which had claimed to be the torchbearer of the spirit of the glorious People Power Revolution. No president since 1986 dared cross the paper. Duterte went for the jugular: He pursued the illegal hold of the newspaper’s owners, the Rufino-Prieto family over the MileLong property in the lucrative commercial district of Makati, kicking the clan out of the area last September, and is pursuing the collection of P1.8 billion in unpaid rentals.

Fifth, Duterte has destroyed the myth that the Yellow Cult has been God’s gift of governance to the Philippines. That shattered myth has remarkably persisted that even somebody whose job is to study governance in the country, one Richard Heydarian—who boasts in his biodata that he is a regular contributor to Centre for Strategic and International Studies, the Council on Foreign Relations, and a dozen other US media outfits—idolizes the cult’s leader Benigno Aquino 3rd to this day.  *

By simply ignoring the Aquinos, allowing what they detested most, which was to allow the dictator Marcos’ burial at the National Heroes Cemetery, and governing the Philippines in way that highlighted Aquino 3rd’s do-nothing, care-about-nothing rule, Duterte has started to bury this myth of the Yellow Cult that US State Department operators created in 1986 and has nurtured since. The Yellow Cult’s excrements — such as the Mamapasano massacre, the Dengvaxia debacle, the hijacking of government funds — have floated to the surface for the public to be aghast over.

Report from Manila Times