For The Bohol Tribune
In This Our Journey
NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS
One mind-boggling development during recent weeks, prior to the installation
of what has been promised as a
government of change, is the announced participation of the communist left
headed by its leader, Jose Ma. Sison, in the incoming Duterte administration.
Neither the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), The National
Democratic Front (NDF), nor the New People’s Army (NPA) has issued any
statement to justify this move which effectively ranks them as part of the so-called
Coalition for Change, an assortment of political parties of various shades and
colors. Well, indeed, not unlike the proverbial rainbow.
From red to mixed colors seems to be an apt description for this rather
unexpected transformation of the party of the proletariat to a united front of the
country’s economic and political elites who have ruled the country since the
first Republic under Emilio Aguinaldo.
In signing up as part of the Duterte regime the Left has taken the
reformist path for which it has maligned the old Communist Party whose leaders
were buried in oblivion by the Sison-led Mao Tse Tung-inspired movement
starting in the late Sixties. Sison’s CPP has been invited by President-elect Duterte
to name appointees for the departments of social welfare, labor, agrarian
reform and environment and natural resources.
The President-elect attests the CPP has considerable experience in these
sectors. To be sure, the CPP has sacrificed lives in efforts to achieve reforms
in these areas.
It look like both sides, the Government and the Left, are poised to
announce the happy ending to more than 30 years of conflict. The involvement of
the Left in the Duterte administration will necessarily end the protracted
struggle against feudalism, bureaucrat-capitalism and imperialism, which the
Left the basic problems of Philippine society.
These are the key problems that any activist in the Sixties and Seventies
would be ready to swear and scream against at the drop of a placard. Or die, if
need be. Many actually died, most of them young, more as victims of their
idealism and the massive recruitment of the Left to fight a war in which the
young heroes of my generation were unprepared to wage.
Meanwhile, the nation waits with bated breath, to use a cliché, for a justification from the
Sison’s camp on why it is now shifting strategy from the armed struggle what it
used to refer to as the parliamentary road.
It will be quite a stretch of the imagination to believe that the CPP
will be allowed to engage in the armed struggle while its sympathizers and
allies are running key departments of the Government. Nothing like it in the
world, but it looks like everything has become possible under the new
dispensation.
Many people believe that in aligning with the new Administration, Sison’s
group is actually taking the smart move to revitalize its own ranks. In recent
years, the movement has had to contend with loss of prestige and credibility
among the people on account of the misadventures of its military arm. It has
also lost its appeal among the youth, who are preoccupied with other causes, definitely
unrelated to the attainment of national democracy in the country.
It will be an unprincipled move if the left will join forces with the
Duterte government simply because the President-elect was once a student of
Professor Sison in San Beda. Surely there must be a more substantial reason other
than this for abandoning a cause for which thousands of lives have been
sacrificed and has caused untold miseries among families and local communities.
I assume that a significant number of the 16 million or so who voted for
the President-elect would like also to hear from Sison and his fellow
revolutionaries about their support to Federalism, one of the pillars of the
Administration’s program aside from its announced policy to pay bounties to
government-paid police and military for the arrest or shooting down of drug
lords and pushers.
It will be good to know if the leaders of the communist Left think that feudalism,
bureaucrat
capitalism and imperialism can be more effectively done away with in
decentralizing political and fiscal authority to component States or
subnational levels of governance. I remember a UP student leader – I think his
name was Samuel Tan from Diliman, getting a lot of attention and contrary
opinion by opposing decentralization on the ground that it may actually reinforce
the elites in their exercise of political and economic power.
He says the decentralized system will actually favor the elites because they
do not have to contend with opposition on a national scale. In his analysis,
the ruling elites can actually consolidate their hold on the country’s
political and economic life by federalism which weakens rather than strengthens
opposition to their rule and the abuses that usually accompany the exercise of
almost absolute power politically and economically.
I will be interested to find out how Mr. Sison and the national democrats
view Federalism in the context of the struggle against Feudalism, Bureucrat
Capitalism and Imperialism. Their shift to parliamentary struggle will confirm
the popular view that at this time and age, armed revolution cannot possibly
win against massive State power bolstered by alliances with either Russia or
the US, as well as with emerging superpower, China.
The emergence of terrorist groups with capacity to launch military
attacks to do extensive damage to what
they perceive as enemy population groups and nation-states will further hamper
efforts to mobilize support to national liberation and revolutionary forces. To
achieve much-needed structural reforms
in Third World countries, which include the Philippines, will not be top
priority among the superpowers who are involved in a war of attrition against
terrorist groups.
In our country,the question of the hour is: will Federalism be the way to
go to effect radical changes that will result in meaningful agrarian reforms
and in the process, create of more opportunities for education, employment,
enterprise development and other components of equitable and sustainable human
development among the less privileged sectors of society?
It is also timely to ask what type of Federalism will the Coalition for
Change vote for that will fit our needs at this stage of the country’s
development given basic structural problems and the challenges posed by illegal
drug use, prevalence of crimes, a significant percentage of which are drug-related.
Let me now share with you some notes from Chapter 7 of the book, Driving
Democracy, published by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government:
-Parliamentary
republics and proportional electoral systems generate horizontal checks and
balances in the core institutions of state. By contrast, federalism and
decentralization lead towards vertical power-sharing among multiple layers of
government.
-Contemporary
debates about decentralized governance have arisen in many plural democracies,
notably among the Francophone majority living in Quebec, the Basques in Spain,
and the Scots in the UK.
These
arguments have been particularly influential in fragile multinational states
afflicted with deep-rooted civil wars where decentralization has been advocated
as a potential constitutional solution aiming to reduce conflict, build peace,
and protect the interests of marginalized communities.
Decentralization
is understood as the devolution of power and responsibilities from the national
to sub-national level.
-Federal
constitutions which strengthen state’s rights and regional autonomy represent
some of the most important strategies, as these safeguard some guaranteed areas
of self-government for geographically-concentrated minorities.
Other common
approaches include :
-devolution
of powers to elected and non-elected regional and local government bodies; ----------shrinking
the state through the privatization of public assets;
-
private-public partnerships, and the contracting out of services to the
non-profit and private sectors;
-delegation
of central departmental responsibilities; and
-decision-making
to local managers in field offices; and the use of traditional village
councils or urban communities for consultation and planning processes.
Encouraged by international agencies, many industrialized
and developing societies have been experimenting with these strategies.
-For example, the World Bank reports that in 1980,
sub-national governments around the world collected on average 15% of revenues
and spent 20% of expenditures. By the late-1990s, those figures had risen to
19% and 25%, respectively, and had even doubled in some regions and countries.
A comparison of trends in West European government during
the last three decades noted a widespread shift from direct control and
intervention by central government to more indirect control exercised primarily
through regulation.
-Fiscal decentralization has expanded among most
industrialized nations during the last three decades, notably with growing
regional autonomy controlling taxation revenue and public expenditure in Spain
and Belgium, but also in other nations such as France, Italy and Denmark.
-Nevertheless no consensus surrounds the impact of these
reforms and the assumed benefits of this strategy have come under vigorous
challenge. Skeptics charge that many of the theoretical claims advanced in
favor of decentralized governance have not been sustained by careful empirical
analysis.
- Indeed some have detected evidence of a backlash against
this movement occurring in Western Europe, with some recentralization happening
in the Netherlands and Sweden. Most seriously, far from maintaining stability
and unity in multination states, critics argue that federalism and
decentralization strategies risk the serious dangers of rigidifying community
differences, encouraging partition or even succession and thus the ultimate
break-up of fragile nation-states.
-Formal constitutional structures in all nations around the
world are classified as ‘unitary states’, ‘federal states’, or an intermediate
category of ‘hybrid unions’. Each of these categories can be further
sub-divided according to the degree of decentralized governance, where fiscal,
administrative, and political powers and functions are transferred to
provincial and local levels.
I find these extracts from the Harvard paper extremely
interesting. I hope the think tanks from the Cabinet and the PDP-Laban Party or
the Coalition for Change have taken upon themselves to study what type of
Federal arrangement best suits our country given its characteristic as
multi-ethnic and diverse religious faith,
a land with well-defined majorities and specific minorities which will have to
be taken into account in deciding the shift towards a more suitable type of
Federalism and decentralization.
Indeed we may all love Federalism but we must avoid a “blind
leading the blind” situation and fall into a sink-hole from which it will be
difficult to claw our way back. The incoming Duterte Administration must
provide leadership as it has promised to do o this vital component of its
program for change.
Let us begin from determining where we are and making sure
where we want to go and decide which type of Federalism can best help us in our
quest for lasting peace and prosperity.. ###
NMP/10 June 2016/2.11
p.m.
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