WHILE it may have seemed in the beginning that a significant fraction from among us in Davao City had been hesitant and apprehensive in “loaning” you out to an unforgiving country for six-year duty, there was also a sense of pride at endorsing you for all you have done here. However, all that is now in the past because that six-year arrangement ends today and you have finally earned your well-deserved rest among us.
While Dabawenyos who have known you all along saw you as an acquired taste or one that needed getting used to like our beloved durian, they likewise knew the outcome far outweighed anything else because as by your achievement record, you have consistently based actions for the good of the majority and not only for a few. That was what this country needed most at the time you won by landslide six years ago. This is not even a poke at the Machiavellian query asked of our incoming president of the country during the just-concluded May national elections. We can only surmise had how you would have addressed it, have that been asked you when you campaigned long ago. Alas, that would have alerted the ruling elites and hierarchy of your coming. When they caught a wind of it, they tried hard to suppress it didn’t they?
Undoubtedly, it had been inevitable that the likes of you had to come along. As writer AA Patawaran had said in a Panorama feature, “at this point in our history, like a revolution, Duterte has to happen… I mean we get what we deserve. Why do we expect light in a country we ourselves have plunged into darkness? After all these decades of leaving the running of our country in the wrong hands, why do we expect something good? Why do we expect to find a good leader in a bad nation, a nation of bad people, for whom abuse of authority, corruption, inefficiency and myopic vision are the accepted norm?”
Whether critics then and from hereon may disagree, the changes that you have effected in government service, which you so insistently espoused had broken far beyond the gates of elitist comfort space and promoted a seed of faith in the people that this can be done and they can be served.
It may have looked that in the six years since you left “to ply your wares elsewhere”, we merely appeared in awe as you plowed through the tall trees. In reverence to our Mayora and now Vice-President, you have left the city in great hands and even from afar, your guidance had not waned.
What else is there left to say now but “Thank you Mr. President”. Like Frodo and Bilbo aboard their white sailing ship to the Undying Lands, you return to us and this fair city that you’ve transformed. Your rest is here. Life is here. At last, like us, the country is glad the likes of you had to come along.
