IN many if not most other countries, the national hero is their founding father, the revolutionary who led their independence movement and later became their first head of state.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a Turkish army officer and revolutionary, founded the Republic of Turkey. Mao Tse Tung led the People’s Liberation Army and founded the People’s Republic of China. Ho Chi Minh led the Viet Minh to victory against the French in the fifties and in the sixties and reunited North and South Vietnam after defeating the South’s powerful ally, the U.S.
Of more recent vintage was Nelson Mandela, who led the movement against apartheid in South Africa and became the country’s first black head of state and the first to be elected in a fully representative democratic election, something we have yet to experience in this country.
In the Philippines, however, the National Historical Commission has yet to identify our national hero (it’s not Jose Rizal as many think). I think it’s because our republic does not have a clear and undisputed founding father. Our non-representative democracy is an oxymoron no revolutionary father could have founded.
Andres Bonifacio led the revolution against Spain but could not become its founding father because he was killed by an ilustrado-led faction in the Katipunan that surrendered our still-born independence to the Americans. It was to the illustrados that the U.S. turned over the reins of government in 1946. It was they alone that gained a strings-attached independence from the U.S. while the rest of us still have to gain independence from their modern day counterparts, today’s political dynasties.
The ilustrado class has always been the only one represented in government. Thus we have never had a truly and fully representative democratic election. Modern day ilustrados alone, political dynasties, can afford to buy the votes of a nation that before was colonized by foreigners but now is colonized by local land, business, and now drug lords.
Hence, we are really still waiting for a national hero that would found a truly and fully representative democratic republic. Until he/she comes along the Philippines’ sham democracy will remain a prison with elected officials acting more like jail guards that don’t want us to get out yet are not doing anything, and even opposing attempts, to make the rest of us share the good life they enjoy in their high positions.
The saddest part of all is that we continue to re-elect our jail guards and are happy to just be their wards to make our lives bearable. A national hero has yet to come to lead us in raging against the darkness of an inequitable situation that political dynasties are now shrilly against changing.