“Minority peoples must never be treated as tolerated
guests but as fully equal partners in a Federal Society.” Swiss Federalism
By Alex P. Vidal
ILONGGO lawyer
Leopoldo “Pol” Causing, a political science professor from the West Visayas
State University (WVSU) in La Paz, Iloilo City, has been an avid advocate of
federalism since time immemorial.
In public market
coffee shops, hotels, schools, media symposia, Causing, a brilliant analyst of
political and social events in the country, speaks passionately about the need
for our system to shift to federalism.
Causing believes that
graft and corruption in the legislature will be nipped in the bud once our
government structure has been federalized.
“We no longer need to
suffer from the rapacity of our over-fed senators,” bewailed Causing, one of
the original pillars of the Iloilo Press Club.
The renewed interest
on federalism snowballed mostly outside Metro Manila where strong sentiments
can be felt in the heels of the “pork barrel” imbroglio involving mostly
members of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
“That is to be
expected,” Dr. Jose Palu-ay Dacudao, an Ilonggo brain surgeon now based in
Butuan City and advocate of federalism, told us on several occasions.
INTEREST
“Interest in federalism
has been waxing and waning intermittently perhaps for the past three or four
decades, especially among the educated and the learned who sincerely would like
to see permanent structural changes in Philippine society for the better,”
explained Dacudao.
“And why not? After
all is said and done, any honest intelligent educated person will have to agree
that the only possible governmental system overhaul that can provide lasting
improvement for Philippine society is federalism.”
In fact, the single
biggest move for federalism in post Spanish Philippines has occurred relatively
recently, Dacudao reminded us.
Last December 2005, a
Presidential Constitutional Commission, that was expected to recommend federalism,
submitted its draft to the congress.
To the most severe
disappointment and frustration of pro-federal people in the Philippines, the
ConCom draft contained not a single federal provision; and worse, it was
actually anti-federal, said Dacudao.
Now that moves for federalism
seem to be in the air again, it might be a good thing to review what happened.
Below is an analysis
by Dacudao, who named his advocacy to “Save Our Languages Through Federalism”:
Trouble with the
Concom Draft: There are serious and troubling criticisms to the ConCom draft.
1.The ConCom draft
describes a Unitarian Unicameral Parliamentary Government that could approve federalism
only after it has approved the application of 60% of Philippine provinces to
become ‘territories’.
There are 72
provinces, and 60% of that is 43.2 provinces.
Therefore, 44
provinces have to repeatedly apply for ‘territory’, and all of them have to be
approved by the Manila-based Parliament.
Knowing Philippine
politics, if a Provincial Governor is at odds with the Prime Minister, or if
Manila-based politicians sense that part of their budget would be taken by the
province (or other such similar conditions), an application probably would not be
approved.
Even if Manila were to
approve only one provincial application per year, it would take 44 years before
the Philippines could legally qualify for Federalism, and Manila would still
have the final say. At present, the legal process to Federalize the Philippines
consists of a single legal step-propose a Federal draft to Congress, which
approves with its changes (or does not approve), followed by ratification of
the citizens of the Philippines of the final draft in a plebiscite.
Far from its claim of
promoting Federalism, the ConCom draft imposes 44 additional legal steps requiring
the approval of Manila, which may or may not give it, every step of the way.
IMPOSE
2.The ConCom draft
allows the Parliament to impose its laws over a ‘territory’, thus making it no
different from a province.
3.In the ConCom draft,
there is no fiscal autonomy for the provinces (or ‘territories’).
Manila collects the
taxes, and ‘automatically’ allocates a budget for each province, IRA-style.
We already know from
present IRA controversies that this ‘automatic’ allocation is not automatic at
all, and is a main source for provincial Manila-dependent politics and
corruption.
As can be seen above,
the Con Com draft, far from promoting federalism (in fact it has no federal
provisions at all), makes Federalism practically speaking impossible in the
Philippines. And this, even after most of the province-based NGO’s consulted by
the ConCom expressed their favor for Federalism.
In retrospect, that
the ConCom draft was in practical terms anti-Federal should have been expected.
The ConCom was led and
peopled mostly by known Tagalistas.
A movement should
never allow itself to be hijacked by its ideological opposition; it’s the
equivalent of ideological suicide.
Modern federalism in
multi-ethnic Europe and India has almost always been motivated primarily not by
economic reasons but by the just libertarian aspirations of their diverse
ethnolinguistic peoples. Ethnic diversity is a keystone of Federalism.
The ConCom draft never
even mentions the ethnolinguistic groups of the Philippines, as if they did not
exist.
That reveals just how
un-federal its commissioners were.
