OBVIOUSLY not for Negros development, not for the alleviation of the vulnerable sectors from the morass of poverty and powerlessness, but for their own political expediency and in defense of their respective turf.
I expected this since last year that Unega and Love Negros, both aggrupation representing landed elite interests and the veterans in politics of patronage and “butterflyism,” will come to some sort of truce cum merging to prevent the elite factional struggles burst into unmanageable level, thus undermining the entire reign of the elite rule.
Problems after problems have battered the Negros elites since the Duterte administration came to power. The island’s leading elites including most in the merger campaigned against Duterte. Duterte retaliated by shooting down the Negros Island Region (NIR) set up. Then he warned that a number of local executives in Negros are drug financiers and peddlers, in cahoots with local police and military officers.
In an apparent move to appease Duterte, most of them shifted to PDP-Laban, as easy as their changing of luxury cars when sugar is in the boom. Thanks to the facilitation of local PDP officials who after the elections turned out to be just the same as their elite patrons, and in fact, we're closer to the elites than the hardcore Duterte forces mostly belonging to the masa and the lower middle class.
Except for a few local elites Duterte has nurtured for their secret support to his campaign, the president has kept a stern eye on the leading elites, waiting for right opportune time to hit them back.
Well, this is the funny, and deplorable, the thing about the Negros trapos’ (traditional politicians) politics of expediency. They have long in rumblings but short in memories. Their rumblings of discontentment and opposition are easily pressed underneath by easily forgetting their contradictions for survival’s sake.
In essence, though, this class of people really have many things to unite, than divide. They have permanent interests, and no permanent friends and foes. They go with the flow when they are weak, but wreak havoc on anything and anyone when they are strong.
Only a few will stand as opposition to the merging, and most would only be in small and peripheral towns encircled by the political monsters.
A deeper reason for the merging which was hatched by the king maker’s men is to ensure that the main elite factions in Negros would be able to effectively control the process, set up and composition of the regional federal state should it be pushed through before or after 2019.
This could also be the reason that the king has temporarily stepped aside to project among the members of the merger that he is giving others a chance to lead while conjuring among Negrenses his commitment to regional development.
At the sideline, he would have a better view of the bigger scenario, more time for lobby work with the ruling administration, get in more projects, maybe do more for repositioning sugar industry, and relate more on a one on one with merger members and others - all in preparation for one big agenda, to head the regional federal state.
He arrests political factionalism, make everybody happy, unify the elite base for a shift to federal state, and ensures himself of taking the helm of the possible new political set up. Master war tacticians call it, one step backward, two steps forward.
Indeed, a master stroke by an emerging kingmaker of Negros.
But to Vice governor Bong Lacson, who doesn’t seem to care what the world tells of him, and just keep as consistent and humble as he could be in providing good leadership in the SP and in programs he run, may he can influence and transcend the petty and patronage politics of his new political circle into one that exemplify genuine public concern and participatory governance as he himself once demonstrated as then mayor of San Carlos City.
To the poor and marginalized sectors and the smaller political groupings, the unity of the elites always poses a big problem.
It is a condition that gives them a little breathing spell and a harder time to work and advance their short and long terms demands and interests, within and outside the corridors of the state.
The challenge for them is to master the science and art of convergence and opposition, unifying and splitting, winning small but doable demands, working painstakingly within and outside the elite-dominated local government units, alongside the need for persistent and comprehensive mass arousing, organizing and mobilizing to develop organized mass power to advance real social change.
The elites don’t give up power voluntary. The government doesn’t share power with any insurgent armed and unarmed forces. Only an empowered people with a mastery of how to seize and use power itself can correct the skewed system.
The marginalized sectors put their short and long-term agenda into imaginative, creative, dynamic and doable means to realize them.
Einstein once said, we cannot solve a problem with the same mindset and methods that created it.
The merger may be advantageous to the elites for now. But the worsening socio-economic crisis and the growth of the people’s social movement will eventually meet and weaken them and render them ineffective no matter how they assert or impose their command of resources and state force.
(For feedback, email ombion.ph@outlook.com)