Talk is rife that the party-list system will be reformed. Also, last December an anti-dynasty bill was filed in Congress at the urging of no less than the country’s top dog. This is pure theater, designed to dampen people’s anger at the disastrous way political dynasties are running this country.
Wealthy upper and lower house legislators will never transform the party-list system into something that gives the marginalized sector a voice in government. Hardly likely since doing so would loosen their grip on the country’s control levers and humans are not known to willingly share or give up power.
Too, the bill that Speaker Faustino Dy III and Majority Leader Sandro Marcos filed could actually, as some sectors suspect, turn out to be a pro-dynasty law. That or a law that has no teeth. If nothing else, we have to credit dynasty politicians with enough brains to see that implementing the ban on political dynasties is political suicide.
It is actually the election system that ensures their continued monopoly of political power. You can reform the party-list system and enact an anti-dynasty law, but as long as elections are won on dole-outs of cash, jobs and other favors, wealth, not competence and integrity, will continue to win elections. From this fatal flaw in the system, dynasty politicians derive the motivation to (subconsciously?) keep the electorate poor and uneducated the easier to buy them during elections.
The problem is clearly systemic. The solution, therefore, has to be system overhaul. But this puts us in the grip of a vicious cycle. To be rid of dynasties we need to reform the party-list and election systems and implement the ban on political dynasties. Yet today, the only ones who are in a position to reform them are political dynasties that do not want them reformed, much less overhauled.
To break the cycle, the voiceless majority who stand to benefit from socio-structural changes must acquire political power. They just have to take the first step of the long journey (many life-times long?) towards uniting around a political party that would be strong enough to win elections and introduce systems that provide equal justice and equal opportunity to all.
Recent events show the country is at a cross road. Events indicate it cannot stay on the road it has been traversing that clearly leads to further marginalization of the majority. But it will stay on that road for as long as political dynasties have a firm grip on political power.
If Edsa taught us anything, it is that united anger does not bring us to a place of equal justice and equal opportunity. We have to channel our anger towards hard-core organizing of the true opposition. The marginalized and their champions have to coalesce into a political party, popular enough to gain political power and turn systems around… legally and peacefully as violence only makes things worse besides not having any guarantee of success.
P.S. Before press time I read of a proposed cha-cha. Whatever for? Political dynasties do not mind the constitution anyway but always do what they want. Hence, nothing short of taking political dynasties out of power will improve the country’s socio-economic situation.