Revolutionary government: anyone?

By Modesto P. Sa-onoy

This is a free country and anybody can talk as much as his mouth can carry although there are limits to this right to expression. Advocating the overthrow of the government, for instance, will land the speaker in jail as much as maliciously imputing crimes on others.

Anyway, there is a group of people, identified to be allies of President Rodrigo Duterte who are calling for the formation of a revolutionary government. In effect they are urging the President to declare a revolutionary government like President Corazon Aquino. She then declared vacant all positions in government, elected or not, and appointed her own people of the People Power Movement to take over the vacated positions. They were called Officers in Charge or OIC. Many were so incompetent and subservient that they were called “oic” in parody of the growling of a pig.

President Duterte has distanced himself from this group, an indication he does not like it and his spokesmen have brushed aside the call for such a radical move.

Nevertheless, the group was persistent and soon the government simply clamped up. The denial by the government, however, was taken seriously by, well, a serious group because the government was quick to act on a slight indication or hint of rebellion but not this one.

A group of lawyers criticized the government for “allowing talk of establishing a revolutionary government and not taking action on it.” The lawyers warned that government tolerance “is dangerous and would erode the rule of law in the country.”

“There is danger in letting movements like this fester without immediate action,” the Philippine Bar Association said, “especially when taken against a backdrop of a Philippines grappling with a pandemic and economic crisis, and a presidential term nearing its end.”

Last week, the “Mayor Rodrigo Duterte-National Executive Coordinating Committee” assembled at the Clark Freeport “to call for a revolutionary government.”

This call echoed the possibility of a revolutionary government by the President himself several times in the past. In this one, he has distanced himself in an address on Tuesday.

There had been calls for this kind of government in the past, just a year after President Duterte was elected into office in 2016.

The concern of the PBA is based on the fact that while President Duterte does not want a revolutionary government, his administration would not prevent citizens from expressing their support of an extra-legal move.

Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said, “The chief executive in numerous occasions articulated that he allows protests and other forms of mass action as long as public safety and convenience are not compromised.”

The PBA warned that the gathering at Clark “was just the latest in a series of openly defiant acts that target the duly-constituted government. While the true principals have yet to show their faces, their method is already clear—to sow subtle seeds meant to erode the Rule of Law and the Constitution.”

The PBA also noted that revolts do not happen overnight. “It summons its strength over time and creeps on the unwary. It capitalizes on overconfidence.”

Indeed the history of all revolutions tells us that movements for the forcible removal of a government took time, some as long as ten years, as the principals tested the waters and slowly built up their forces for a push.

The lawyers are right when they declared that the “greatest sin we can commit right now is to dismiss or to ignore the true dangers these repeated calls for ‘revgov’ pose.”

Every day the news is dominated by the pandemic and the people are concerned with their own safety that political matters are shunted aside.

Indeed, the Philippines’ current situation—a pandemic, economic crisis, and a presidency on its last two years—paints “an alluring combination for those who desire power above all,” the PBA said. “We should not allow glamour-seeking upstarts to undermine the Constitution and cast the country to another dark era of chaos,” it added.

Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana and Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra reportedly said they do not support the call for the establishment of a revolutionary government.

That is reassuring, but they are presidential appointees and they follow orders.

Let us not allow the pandemic to divert our attention from a graver danger of a revolutionary government.