We’ve been to downtown Davao City yesterday. As we moved around to certain offices and establishments where we have some transactions we realized that former President Rodrigo R. Duterte is not taking Karlo Nograles for granted as a major rival in the coming May election. Duterte who is, unfortunately now detained in a prison at The Hague, Netherlands by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged crime against humanity, is running for mayor of the city. Nograles, and one Bishop Cubos are two of his opponents with Karlo appearing to be more capable of putting up a credible fight.
We based our assumption from the number of printed campaign materials strategically posted or installed on spaces, electric poles, tree trunks and fence of houses along the roads where we happened to use as our routes. Even in rural areas the road sides leading to these places are also littered with campaign posters of the former President alongside with mostly posters of his candidates for councilors, congressmen and senators.
In other words, despite former President Duterte’s knowledge that he enjoys a huge advantage over Nograles he knows he cannot afford to be like one who just “idly watches by a passing sail boat.” Of course now that the former Davao City Mayor and immediate past President of the Philippines is detained in a faraway jail his supporters led by no less than his daughter Vice President Sara Duterte, son Paolo who is congressman of the city’s first district, and Mayor Baste Duterte are picking FPRRD’s unfinished job for his comeback run.
We have no doubt that with the people’s sympathy to the imprisoned former Philippine leader very evident, the job of effectively pursuing their father’s campaign will be much easier.
Meanwhile, we know that with the sentiment of the city’s electorate clearly tilted to the embattled former President and Nograles’ mayoral nemesis, it is a must that the latter should sit down with his campaign strategists, review and then make the necessary adjustments in their plan, if they have to continue hoping to win.
The Nograles camp has to find ways to counter the impact of the Duterte “persecution scenario” without further alienating the Davaoeno voters to the cause or causes the Nograles camp is espousing. How to do this, again they have to sit down and re-do their strategies – if the Nograles camp has any.
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Again, in our trip to the city’s downtown yesterday, we learned how “addictive” politics is. Imagine knowing who the candidates for councilors are in all the city’s three districts. We read campaign materials of sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, cousins of incumbents and outgoing/last termers taking the spots of their elders or close family relatives.
Indeed there must be something very inviting in the position of councilors that even the clearly novice relatives are thrusted to the Council position by their elders. Whatever are the enticements in the position we can only imagine it must be something hardest to resist because no one among those who are there want to abandon their position. Moreover, if the limitation of the councilor’s term sets in, the ones they push to replace them are their closest or kin.
Indeed the time when candidates for councilors in Davao City and everywhere else in the country come from different families is a long gone era. The voters too, are effectively helping perpetuate this family dominance.
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With the way vloggers working for or against any of the protagonists in the ongoing political chaos in the country we can easily educe that they are doing their best and worst to impress their patrons. In the process the mentioned vloggers are only adding immensely to the division of the Filipinos as well as the hatred now rising to a boil among the rabid supporters of the main personalities involved in the country’s major political squabble. We have noted that opposing social media vloggers are advancing contents laced with lies and disinformation.
They even go to the extent of picking up a picture of a massively attended religious procession and present the same as prayer-protest rallies. They also put words to the President of a powerful country, have the same appear to have been published by a leading international publication.
Then there are also these vloggers seemingly supportive to the other protagonist using pictures of people supposedly killed in some operations during the bloody war on drugs. Their deaths as victims of extra judicial killing are denied by relatives.
Adding fuel to the fire is the use of modern technology where the persons embroiled in the controversies generated by the political quarrel. This technology used by highly partisan experts can make anything presented in the social media as real. Unfortunately they are not, but for the genius of some netizens they are made to look the way the vloggers want them appear.
Imagine this and that person appear to be engaged in a brutal fight; or this and that person, specifically Police General Torre and President Bongbong Marcos, Jr. passionately kissing lips to lips.
No thanks to the modern technology and the experts in its use.
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