Tag Archives: Digong

Qwertyman No. 174: Doing the Doable

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 1, 2025

AS NOT a few placards in yesterday’s big anti-corruption march would have said, both President Bongbong Marcos and VP Sara Duterte should resign, along with everyone in public office implicated in the flood-control scandal and all the other shenanigans that have come to light over the past couple of months. 

That probably means half the government, but given the current public mood, the more the better, to give the nation a chance to rebuild itself on new foundations of moral rectitude and accountability. At least that’s the long view, supported by the Left among other parties who think that anything short of a national reset will simply paper over the problems and guarantee their comeback. 

It all sounds good, and it does make sense—except that, as we all know, it ain’t gonna happen. 

It’s about as realistic as the expectation that BBM will fall to his knees, own up to the Marcos billions, and ship all that money back to the Philippines on a FedEx plane for mass distribution, any more than VP Sara will admit to her father’s drug-fueled bloodlust, seek forgiveness of all the tokhang victims, and forsake her presidential ambitions. Let’s face it: the Marcos and Duterte dragons will be clawing at each other all the way to 2028. Meanwhile, what are we mere mortals supposed to do or to hope for? 

In the very least, we can ignore the DDS calls for BBM to step down and for Sara to take over, because there’s even less appetite for that than the Both-Resign demand. The Dutertes want to make hay of the moment, but the sun isn’t exactly shining on them. Despite their strong and well-funded social media efforts, the DDS camp seems pretty much in disarray, with Digong in jail, Sara in limbo until February (it tells me something that they approved the OVP’s 2026 budget in full—it’s for the office, not VP Sara, although she doesn’t seem to know the difference), Bato de la Rosa suddenly scarce, and their shot at a junta takeover badly misfiring. 

(The ICC’s predictable decision not to grant his interim release could in fact prove to be an ironic win. Digong at this point is useful only as emotional capital for Sara’s survival and triumph. His camp, I suspect, secretly wants him to stay in The Hague as a symbol of the Marcoses’ unforgivable perfidy. Bringing him back home will mean having to take care of a grumpy old man whose greatest ability—cursing—isn’t helping him much in his present situation; he was never a Leila de Lima, and certainly no Ninoy Aquino.)

All the players’ moves are interesting in this grand melodrama. I frankly can’t trust the Left, either, to show the way forward. Like a religion (did I hear someone say “Iglesia ni Cristo”?), the Left likes to flaunt its moral ascendancy—to “virtue-signal,” in today’s parlance—and its rock-solid grasp of the global and local situation from the Marxist standpoint. And yet it gets all tone-deaf and cross-eyed when it comes to picking its horses—ditching EDSA, but backing billionaire capitalist Manny Villar and then pseudo-nationalist and butcher Rodrigo Duterte for the presidency (should we even mention slaughtering comrades it deemed wayward in the Ahos campaign?). 

Interestingly, the INC also supported Duterte in 2016, and then BBM and Sara Duterte in 2022. While adopting some progressive liberals like Franklin Drilon, Risa Hontiveros, and more recently Bam Aquino and Kiko Pangilinan into its senatorial slate, it has also flexed its machinery behind Duterte surrogates Bong Go and Bato de la Rosa, as well as corruption-tainted Senators Joel Villanueva and Jinggoy Estrada. During its last mass rally last November 25 for “peace, transparency, and accountability,” however, it was careful to distance itself from recent calls for BBM’s resignation. In other words, the INC is the perfect straddler, the seguristathat makes sure it will survive and prosper under any administration, reportedly to secure key government appointments for its favored nominees.

That leaves us and our own wits, which—considering everyone’s else’s brain fog—might yet prove the most trustworthy.

In the realm of the doable, I want to see heads roll—as close to the top as the situation will allow. One way of looking at this, and strangely enough, is that the Filipino people aside, the party with the greatest stake in seeing this anti-corruption campaign through to the end (i.e., just short of the Palace) is PBBM himself. Having opened this Pandora’s box, he well knows that the only way he can keep his own head and hold sway over 2028 is to catch all those demons he released. I don’t know about you, but right now I’m desperate enough to let BBM finish his term in relative peace if he achieves nothing else than the herculean task of cleaning up the stables.

VP Sara’s impeachment trial should resume in February and will be a more efficient and definitive way to shut her out for good. But we have loads of senators, congressmen, department secretaries and undersecretaries, and lesser flunkies all caught up in this mess who should be held to account for their thievery. Hold the big bosses, the ultimate signatories, accountable, sure. But don’t let the second- and third-level enablers and functionaries off, because the message needs to be sent that complicity won’t pay—and that your sponsors will ditch you when things get too hot.

I want to see our courts work, overtime, to expedite the prosecution of these corruption cases. No pussyfooting, please, no Maguindanao massacre here. Let’s put a quick and decisive end to the kind of legalistic foolishness that lets a senator off the hook for a P30-million “private contribution,” with the judgment rendered by the Comelec commissioner who had previously served as that senator’s lawyer. How the heck can that be allowed to happen? What ethical universe are we in? The same goes for former Ombudsman Samuel Martires’ “forgetting” why he had kept secret his decision junking his predecessor’s carefully crafted case against Sen. Joel Villanueva. 

If the Comelec accepts Sen. Rodante Marcoleta’s ridiculous excuse that he kept millions of political donations off his report of campaign expenses because they were meant to be “secret,” then we should launch a million-people march not just against the likes of Marcoleta but also specifically against the Comelec to hound those charlatans out of office. That commissioner who couldn’t find the shame to recuse himself from his former client’s case should be impeached if he doesn’t resign.

I have no problem with people marching and screaming “Marcos, Duterte, resign!”, because we have billions of reasons to be upset with both. But I hope that doesn’t keep us from going after immediate and tangible if less-than-perfect results. Look at it this way—gut the body, and you’ve effectively chopped off the head.

(Photo from rappler.com)

Qwertyman No. 138: Dutch Entertainment

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 24, 2025

AS I’VE mentioned here before, I was a prisoner once—under martial law, for more than seven months, when I was eighteen. I had been arrested without a warrant for unspecified offenses against the State, on the strength of an Arrest, Search, and Seizure Order (ASSO) issued by Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile. ASSOs were literally a catch-all piece of paper, meant to capture anyone whose face the regime didn’t like. I was sleeping at home when military agents barged in, and scooped me up in front of my terrified parents.

Our prison stood on a patch of land where the upscale BGC stands now; when we looked out at night we could see the neon lights of Guadalupe flashing. We had a small library in the back, TV in the mess hall, chess, calisthenics, and rumor-mongering for entertainment. It wasn’t too bad when there were just 40 of us occupying two Army barracks in the early months of martial law, but when we grew to over 200, the harsh realities of prison life set in, and people began escaping through the barbed wire.

These recollections came back to me last week as I thought about the surprise arrest and deportation of former President Rodrigo Roa Duterte to a holding cell in the Netherlands while awaiting trial by the International Criminal Court.

By any legal reckoning, he’s going to be there for a while—he won’t be arraigned until September—so like it or not he’s going to have to adjust to his new abode over the next few months, like we had to in Bicutan.

His subalterns and supporters can make all the noise they want outside his prison, in the Philippines, and wherever in the world a DDS chapter exists, but RRD’s time ahead in Scheveningen will be largely spent in quiet and solitude.

From what we’ve seen online of his holding cell, Digong’s digs aren’t plush by any standard, but seem fairly adequate and comfortable—just spare enough to suggest to its occupant that he is in some kind of retreat, where he can ponder his worldly actions and contemplate the afterlife. Indeed the room—with its military cot and washbasin—evokes priestly economy, in stark contrast to the sybaritic excesses its previous tenants must have been accustomed to in their prime. In fairness to the incumbent, that lifestyle is something he has never been associated with; part of his popular appeal stems from his image as a man used to sleeping on hard beds and dining on the simplest fare.

There is a large flat-screen TV in the room, through which Digong can follow the news of the world and—given the way that world is going—feel upheld in his conviction that a hard fist and a knock on the head always makes things right. His heroes—Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping (notably the same despots “quoted” by his trolls as expressing their support for him, like character references)—seem to be doing all right, keeping the world safe from the rule of law.

He might learn that the Dutch music industry is undergoing a boom on the strength of songs like “Anxiety” by Doechii and “Guilty” by Teddy Swims. Football, tennis, and golf are the favorite sports of the Dutch, although Digong might also be amused by a Frisian sport called klootschieten, which involves throwing a ball and sometimes drawing blood. Dutch cinema is a small industry, but The Punisher should still be thrilled by local crime classics like “Murder Story” (1989), “Gangsterboys” (2010), and “Accused” (2014).

Should RRD prefer interesting human conversation, I doubt he’s going to get it from the likes of Harry Roque, whose own tribulations must be coming out of Digong’s ears (“I want to go home, and you want to come here?”). If there are any CPP-NDF holdouts left in Utrecht, I’m sure they’ll have  a lot to talk about on a prison visit, going back to the Left’s early flirtation with their “nationalist” ally.

But truth to tell, if I were the former President, I would spend my time in Scheveningen writing my memoirs. I wrote a novel about my government-sponsored Airbnb experience, but given his bluntness, fiction probably won’t be RRD’s best suit.

I suspect Digong is a lot more articulate and maybe even more urbane than he lets on, because no Chief Executive could possibly be that vulgar and that ill-mannered without it being an act (you can imagine him rehearsing those PI’s before the SONA and turning up his collar to look even more roguish). All his life, he has presented himself to be a man of menace, projecting unforgiving brutality, steeping his hands into a cauldron of boiling blood to strike fear into his foes—but couldn’t all that have been just a show in the name of, uhm, good governance? 

The alternative narrative could go thus: In truth and deep at heart, all by his lonesome in his corner of the darkened Palace, he may have been a sensitive and tortured soul whose conscience reared and roared with every fresh report of another tokhang victim, who felt the anguish of every wife and mother like a stab to his own tender heart. He had done what he had to do for the noblest of purposes—the salvation of his suffering people from the stupor of narcotics (about which he knew something himself, but it was only to ease the pain from a motoring accident—all other uses were criminal).

RRD’s memoirs would not only be a spirited defense of his life—an apologia pro vita sua, as they used to be called—but a full, tell-all accounting of everything everyone ever did: henchmen, enemies, beneficiaries, and erstwhile allies alike. If he says he can’t get justice at the Hague, then at least he can dispense some of it from the safety of his albeit involuntary confinement.

Now that would not only be edifying but entertaining, wouldn’t it?

Qwertyman No. 109: Digong’s Conversion

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Qwertyman for Monday, September 2, 2024

RATHER THAN mock former President Rodrigo R. Duterte for his unflinching support for his bosom friend and spiritual adviser, the fugitive Pastor Apollo Quiboloy, I think we should praise and congratulate him for finally seeing the light and acknowledging the importance of human rights.

It must be age, or the reflection afforded by retirement, but the Digong Duterte we heard from last week in the wake of the massive police raid on Quiboloy’s lair was worlds apart from the apoplectic and coarse-tongued person we used to know. It took some time—likely aided by a sobering reversal of political fortunes—but gone is the swaggering Mussolini of the past, prone to profanity and what his apologists liked to call “hyperbole,” replaced by the pained and measured indignation of the aggrieved.

Of course, his statement could have been crafted by one of his former spokespersons, who must therefore take responsibility for the minor grammatical and stylistic infelicities in the text—but how can we even complain about language when gross human rights violations are on the table?

For those of you who missed it because you were wasting your time deploring Caloy Yulo’s filial impiety, here’s what PRRD said, in full:

“Our country has never been in a more tragic state as it is today. Rights have been trampled upon and our laws, derided.

“Early today, elements of the Philippine National Police Regional Office, led by Gen. Nicolas Torre Ill, forced their way into the Kingdom of Jesus Christ compound which resulted to (sic) a violent confrontation and the unfortunate death of one KOJC member and the requiring of (sic) immediate medical attention of many others.

“We sympathize with the members of the KoJC for having become victims of political harassment, persecution, violence and abuse of authority. This certainly puts a dark stain on the hands of those involved in today’s incident, led by no less than the top police official of the region.

“We call on the remaining decent and patriotic members of our government not to allow themselves to be used and to be abusive and violent in enforcing illegal orders.

“We call on all Filipinos, regardless of political persuasion, to offer prayers for peace and justice, and to spare our people of the unwarranted tension brought about by the reign of fear and terror by people sworn to uphold the law and protect the citizens of this country.

“Again, let us ask this administration how it can guarantee the preservation of the constitutional rights of our fellow Filipinos when even the most fundamental of these rights are being blatantly violated? (sic)”

Why, minus the edits, this could have passed for something that PRRD’s arch-nemesis, former Sen. Leila de Lima, could have said a few years ago, before she went off to prison. Or it could have been mouthed by the late Chito Gascon, whose Commission on Human Rights PRRD sought to abolish for meddling in police investigations into dastardly drug deals, even getting Congress to pare its budget down to a more suitable P1,000. 

That Rodrigo Duterte could now speak so eloquently and convincingly of the need to uphold human rights is a testament to the possibility and power of redemptive conversion, which such famous miscreants as Paul of Tarsus and Ignatius of Loyola underwent. Gazing out on the horizon on the beaches of Davao (or in the Quiboloy compound, in his new job as its administrator), the former president must have felt a pang of remorse for all the lives that were needlessly lost under his administration—all because his followers in the police failed to understand, as his spokesmen were at pains to emphasize, that he was “only joking” and was given to “exaggerating” for rhetorical effect.

How in heaven’s name could they have taken him literally when he told a controversial police officer whom he assigned to a southern city in 2019, “Go there and you are free to kill everybody. Son of a b****, start killing there. The two of us will then go to jail!”

The following year, at another event in another province, PRRD was quoted by the newspapers as saying, in Filipino, “All addicts have guns. If there’s even a hint of wrongdoing, any overt act, even if you don’t see a gun, just go ahead and shoot him. You should go first, because you might be shot. Shoot him first, because he will really draw his gun on you, and you will die…. Human rights, you are preoccupied with the lives of the criminals and drug pushers. As mayor and as president, I have to protect every man, woman, and child from the dangers of drugs. The game is killing…. I say to the human rights, I don’t give a shit about you. My order is still the same. Because I am angry!”

Now, there’s every possibility that the president may have been misquoted by journalists hungry for incendiary news. But even granting that PRRD did say horrible things like that—perhaps in a fit of desperation over the fact that the drug menace he promised to eradicate in six months was still very much around toward the end of his presidency—that allegedly murderous despot is a ghost in the past. Today’s Digong is a sensitive soul with a nuanced sensibility that understands and will not countenance “abuse of authority” and “illegal orders,” especially when these are implemented by ingrates in the police force whose base pay he doubled (shame on the 2,000 cops who apparently forgot this in their brazen assault).

Indeed, if Rodrigo Roa Duterte can undergo and manifest such a miraculous conversion, then hope yet exists for the rest and the worst of us, who wallow in unproductive cynicism. Indeed it might even be that his resistance to the idea of yielding Pastor Quiboloy to the authorities stems from the deep debt of gratitude he feels toward his spiritual adviser, with whom he must have read and parsed many a Bible story. If there’s anything we Filipinos and especially the Dutertes understand and respect, it’s the value of friendship—right? Something in me already misses the old Digong, but I’ll gladly march with this new one in defense “of the constitutional rights of our fellow Filipinos.” I hope Sen. Leila can find it in her heart to forgive and forget, and link arms with Lady Justice’s latest convert.

Qwertyman No. 100: The Political Doghouse

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Qwertyman for Monday, July 1, 2024


TO NO one’s great surprise, Vice President Sara Duterte resigned from her concurrent posts as Secretary of Education and vice-chair of that long-named (short name: red-tagging) council. Maybe because I was far away from Davao when the news came in, I heard no wailing and gnashing of teeth. A tree fell in the forest. The world moved on.

Inday Sara promised to continue to be a mother to the country’s teachers—the same people she had ordered to strip their walls bare of teaching aids. She was back in the news a week later after reportedly announcing that her father and two brothers were going to run for senator in next year’s elections. Her name was brought up as a possible “leader of the opposition.” None of these silly propositions generated the kind of groundswell she may have been hoping for, as someone once touted to be a shoo-in for the presidency who just got suckered into sliding down to No. 2 (to her Papa Digong’s boundless dismay) in a deal craftily brokered by former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

To Duterte diehards—and let’s face it, there are still quite a few, although being out of office tends to lose people by the day—Sara will always be their golden girl, the victim of craven betrayal by their erstwhile “Uniteam” ally. To her non-fans, she will always be the bratty bureaucrat who demanded P650 million in confidential funds and who bragged about spending P125 million of DepEd money in the time it takes you to say “low PISA scores.”

Where she goes from here is the big question. In a touch of supreme irony, she now finds herself in almost exactly the same position as her predecessor, Leni Robredo, who was boxed out of Digong Duterte’s Cabinet and pretty much left on her own.

And there the inevitable and (for Sara) unfortunate parallels arise, because VP Leni shunned privilege, turned her exclusion into a challenge, and made the OVP a model of what a government office with meager funds could do, with honest, visionary and purpose-driven leadership. Leni became, and continues to be, beloved, as close to a saintlike figure as any elected official could aspire to be. That this quality failed to propel Robredo to the presidency says more about our electorate and political culture than about her—the dark, mutable, and serpentine side of Philippine politics that the Dutertes thrive in.

I have no doubt whatsoever that Sara Duterte will continue to be politically engaged and even run for the presidency in 2028, no matter what. In that, she will have less to worry about from Leni Robredo, who has expressed her desire to return to local politics in Naga, than from the likes of the eminent Sen. Raffy Tulfo, who topped Pulse Asia’s latest survey of presidential contenders at 35 percent against Sara’s 34 and Leni’s 11. Yes, that’s the kind of electorate we have, which can’t tell between meritocracy and mediocrity, so Sara will prosper in that environment and may even win against BBM’s anointed (Speaker Martin Romualdez scored a dismal 1 percent in the same survey).

Still, 2028 is four long years down the road, a lot of time for things to congeal and to unravel. Familia Duterte will close in and consolidate behind the name and the tough-guy brand, and in the event that all three Duterte boys make it to the Senate—an absurdity moderated only by the presence today of so many DNA matches in that august body—then Sara’s path to the Palace will have been cleared by a bulldozer. 

Of some minor interest is the fate of the two Digong acolytes in the Senate—Sens. Bong and Bato—who seem to be feeling orphaned. Both have been making the requisite pledges of fealty to the Dutertes, despite Bong Go being slammed by Davao Mayor Baste Duterte for not defending their home turf loudly enough from the lofty positions to which their patron raised them. Chastised, the two said they would support a Senate inquiry into the “excessive use of force” in the police raid against fugitive pastor Apollo Quiboloy, whom Sen. Bato had vowed to guard with his life should he appear in the Senate under subpoena—a degree of sensitivity and solicitude profoundly absent from the murderous “tokhang” campaign that both men supported.

So the Dutertes are far from dead and gone, but BBM—and let’s not forget the Kakampink forces simmering below the surface—has four more years to vaporize the Uniteam that never really was. (And then again, BBM claims that the Uniteam remains intact—nothing to worry about, folks!—because the Dutertes’ political party, the PDP, was never part of the coalition. Say that again?)

More important than preserving the fiction of the Uniteam, the opening provides Marcos with yet another opportunity to shore up his political capital—already boosted by his turnaround from his predecessor’s policies on Chinese aggression and on the war on drugs—by selecting a qualified, full-time professional for the post. Several names have been mentioned in a hypothetical shortlist, none of them apparently an expert in basic education, where most of our problems begin. And while it may be true, as Inday Sara herself noted, that you don’t have to be a teacher to be DepEd secretary, you have to understand that Philippine education needs more than mandatory toothbrushing to brighten up.

Ultimately, Sara Duterte’s resignation from her DepEd post may yet be her most valuable service to the nation, by opening the door to someone vastly more qualified to take on that critical job—unless, again, the DepEd is made to serve its other purpose as a doghouse for political strays.