WHEN the government of God was introduced to this magnificent world through Christendom, Jesus Christ chose 12 disciples to carry out the mission in propagating the gospel of the kingdom. Without any connection to this administration, President Duterte originally introduced 12 senatorial candidates in an attempt to position 12-0 for the senate seats in the recently concluded election.
Along the trail of campaign, however, there were dropouts for undisclosed concerns. Then the long day of noisy voting on May 13 came, tailed by the night of seven-hour deafening silence. And the next day, we woke up wordless that not all 12 new senators are his disciples.
Noisy day: The high level of excitement pervaded the air in many polling precincts. One of the loudest cries of the living voters was the perpetual resurrection day of the dead to cast their votes, and the migratory listing of their names to nowhere to be found; the few conflicts of supporters in central Mindanao; the shortage of marking pens; the uncooperative and malfunctioning VCMs; and the poor standard SD cards.
Silent night: The day ended and the transmission of results followed. But due to the influx of data beyond the protocol capacity, the apps failed; only to find out that the Java script needed to be debugged. The process of securing permission from the Comelec en banc to debug, debugging, and the warm reboot, took about 7 straight hours; and it was fixed. IT experts named it a program glitch, but that “glitch” must be scrutinized.
In spite of all clutters, the Comelec declared a successful election, and we have newly elected public servants from the senate down to the local level. Odd as we look new faces of the same dynasty if you may call it, but this is the evil of democracy that we all ought to embrace.
The present composition of the 18th congress is advantageous to us in all sense without naming their political affiliations, why? First, it composed of men and women with diverse professional and family background. There are lawyers, businessmen, police and military, sportsperson, timid film actor, and a macho budots adept. Second, even if majority of the senators are close allies to the president, they all exercise individual de jure power as their conscience dictate for the good of the Filipinos. This means, no rubber stamp and no blind loyalty to the party. Even senator-elect Bato dela Rosa, whose emotional and physical superiority I admire said during and after the campaign that his loyalty to the party ends when his loyalty to the people begins.
We see therefore that the incoming senators will strive to maintain check and balance as expected, amidst the discipleship efforts of the administration.
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