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Sunday, 05 September 2010
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Public Affairs: a Boholano View

  By Jose “Pepe” Abueva

The Best Time for Charter Change is Now:With President Benigno S. Aquino III.

  

   

 “The President’s legitimacy and high popular trust will make his initiative to change the Constitution most welcome and the least suspicious.” 

  

Wrong time for ChaCha?

  

In its editorial on July 8, the Philippine Daily Inquirer declared it was the wrong time to consider Charter change, and gave these reasons.

  

There was no mandate to President Benigno S. Aquino to change the Constitution. His election even meant rejection of former President Arroyo’s failed ChaCha initiative which she has revived in her new proposal as a Representative. It would be distracting to President Aquino whose priority should be to push his legislative agenda. Better to have  his proposed commission to study the need for Charter change, and to effect the change in connection with the elections in 2013.

  

No, now is the best time!

  

On the contrary, I strongly believe that now is the best time. The initiative for Charter change is a supreme act of the national leadership. Our new President’s legitimacy and high popular trust (88 per cent according to the latest survey of the Social Weather Stations) will make his initiative to change the Constitution most welcome and the least suspicious.  

  

As a student of politics and governance, I believe it is the primordial duty of President Benigno S. Aquino III to initiate policy and institutional changes in our Constitution by asking Congress to act soon after as he settles down in his presidency. No need for a commission as he has said, or a referendum to consult the people on the question.

  

A constitutional convention would be the most acceptable mode of Charter change because of lingering distrust of Congress. Why? Unfortunately, with some exceptions, our representatives and senators are no longer held in high regard as they used to be. Right or wrong, most of them are seen as self-serving, untrustworthy, and ineffectual as political leaders.

 

 

 

At the latest 2013 would be a good time for a national plebiscite on the proposed constitutional amendments.  

 

 

Under PGMA Charter change was demonized, trivialized, and junked.

  

On hindsight, I believe that under President Arroyo Charter Change from 2004 onward suffered mortally by her sponsorship of it, and by the wrong method of a Constituent Assembly without the Senate, or by the controversial People’s Initiative. On the whole, therefore, the attempts at Charter change suffered from wrong timing.

  

In 2006 the leaders of the People’s Initiative (PI) to change our presidential system to a parliamentary system gathered the required voters’ signatures in each and all the congressional districts and in the whole nation. But the Commission on Elections refused to validate the signatures. The Supreme Court by a majority vote of 8 to 7 denied the PI leaders’ petitions to compel the COMELEC to validate the signatures so that the proposed amendments could be submitted to a national plebiscite. To me, the PI exercise showed that the people are not really the sovereign source of government authority as stated in the Constitution (Article II. Section 1).

  

Despite many resolutions filed by its members, Congress failed jointly to propose amendments to the Constitution from 1996 to early 2005. President Arroyo formed the 2005 Consultative Commission on Charter Change and appointed its 55 members. I was chosen to chair the Commission.

  

We held regional consultations and then came up with our proposals for a shift to a parliamentary system, for creating autonomous territories or regions in transition to  establishing a federal republic, and for liberalizing the constitutional provisions on foreign participation in our development. Except for helping to popularize and mainstream the ideas and issues of Charter change, the serious PI exercise also failed.

  

Charter Change can be our new President’s foremost and enduring legacy.

  

For our popular and reformist new President his historic initiative would enable him to leave a major legacy of basic and enduring innovations. And also of correcting the now well known basic flaws in the 1987 Constitution, also remembered as the “Cory Constitution.” 

  

Senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino by his heroic defense of democracy and martyrdom hastened the collapse of the Marcos dictatorship. President Corazon Aquino led the nation in ending the Marcos dictatorship at the EDSA revolt and restoring our democracy. In his own time President Benigno S. Aquino III can reform and revitalize our democracy through his transforming leadership and historic Charter change.

  

If he takes this supreme challenge, before his term ends in 2016 we can be hopeful and confident that in due course our reformed constitutional policies and political institutions will enable our country to sustain our political, economic, and social development and modernization. We can institutionalize good governance and hasten nation-building.

 

  

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Dr. Jose V. Abueva is U.P. Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Public Administration, and former U.P. president (1987-1993). He is President and Professor at Kalayaan College in Quezon City which he founded with fellow U.P. professors in 2000. He was Secretary of the 1971 Constitutional Convention and Chairman of the Legislative-Executive Military Bases Council under President Corazon Aquino. He also chaired the 2005 Consultative Commission on Charter Change.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before he was elected president of U.P. he served the United Nations University for ten years (1977-1987). He finished high school at the Central Visayan Institute in Jagna, Bohol in 1947, then obtained his A.B, (Arts-Law) cum laude from U.P. From the University of Michigan he got his M.A. in Public Administration and Ph.D. in Political Science.       

 
 
According to Randy David, real change will come only by social transformation PDF Print E-mail
Written by Administrator   
Monday, 24 August 2009

Real Change is the result of change in policy, structure, institutions

 

Public Lives
Change

By Randy David, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 08/22/2009

 

 

There’s a popular French saying, “plus ça change, plus c’est pareil.” It means, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” This ironic observation is a testimony to the enduring nature of structures. Events in everyday life may suggest unending flux, but the fluidity can be superficial, masking the unshakable character of an underlying order. This realization however only comes with the passage of time. We can be so caught up in the drama of single events that we don’t notice the basic continuity of things.

 

 

There have been many milestones in our nation’s life. We fell under foreign rule at various times. The arrival of each new set of tyrants, wrote the nationalist historian Renato Constantino, was heralded as a moment of liberation. For many Filipinos, 1946—the year we got our formal independence from the Americans—was supposed to be a real watershed, the start of our life as a sovereign nation. But, except for the changes in fortune of the small Filipino elite that took over the reins of government, and the rise of a tiny middle class, the old order was untouched. The landscape of social inequality and mass poverty was largely preserved.

This unchanged terrain has been our most enduring legacy. Over the years following independence, it has bred its own feudal bosses and followers, its own shallow economy and hybrid consciousness. To this day, it is protected against explosive change by a thick undergrowth that keeps it securely fastened to the motherboard of its former colonial master, the United States of America. It is this entire social order that has kept us from becoming a modern, democratic and prosperous society.

Every election year, we look for new faces that can personify our people’s yearning for meaningful change. This fixation with personalities grossly exaggerates the role that individuals play in the reconstruction of society. It devalues the need for policy changes that can create the conditions for long-term shifts in the social order. 

One only needs to take a look at the societies that are today being hailed as dynamic and successful in order to understand what social change entails. They share a couple of things in common. 1. Education is compulsory for everyone, rather than a function of wealth, social status, or gender. 2. The rule of law rises above the claims of wealth, power, or status, assuring justice to everyone who comes before the courts. 3. Politics is insulated from wealth, religion, and family, thus ensuring equal access to public positions. 4. Religion is a matter of individual choice. 5. The economy offers everyone open access to markets and occupations. Here, at once, we may see the principal obstacles that have constrained the full development of the Philippines into a modern society.

 

 

Access to lifelong learning and knowledge has been blocked for many of our people. This is evident not only in the way in which the State has delegated an increasing portion of the educational function to the private sector, but also in the various ways in which the government taxes the acquisition of knowledge. Every aspiring developing nation has made massive investment in basic and advanced education the spear point of its quest for modernity, except the Philippines.

 

 

 

Justice through the legal system has remained as elusive for the vast majority of our people as the satisfaction of their basic material needs. The corruption of our courts, the police, and the entire justice system is legendary. With no money or political connection, the poor are forced to seek justice elsewhere. The persistence of various insurgencies mirrors the failed character of our legal system.

 

 

 

Politics in our country is so tied up to networks and layers of patronage that our electoral campaigns are among the most expensive in the world. Instead of political parties, the prime movers of our political life are the political clans. The interests of the latter are intertwined with the business groups that control the economy. Our politicians pursue political power not to realize their vision for the nation but to protect and strengthen the position of the economic blocs that fund their political ambitions. This has resulted in the conversion of nearly every agency of the State into a tool of the ruling political-economic faction.

 

 

 

Thank God we are not a theocracy and the freedom to choose our religion is a reality and not just a promise. But something has to be said about the extraordinary influence that the Catholic Church still wields in the conduct of government. While we cannot fault the Church for speaking up on public issues in which it feels moral values are threatened, we expect government to be autonomous in its decision-making. Indeed, the fusion of State and ecclesiastical authority remains a problematic feature of our national order.

 

 

 

Finally, the economy—while it is nominally open in the sense that no one who has the means and qualification is barred from acquiring any property or entering any occupation—remains fundamentally restricted because of the highly unequal distribution of opportunity. The tight control that a few families maintain over the nation’s wealth impedes entrepreneurial growth. The money in the hands of the many is so small it casts them in the role of consumers, never as investors.

 

 

Only when we’ve seen radical changes in education, the justice system, the economy, politics and religion, can we truthfully say that things are no longer the same.

 

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Last Updated ( Monday, 24 August 2009 )
 
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