Richard Heydarian is an Asian-based academic and columnist for “The Rise of Duterte: a Populist Revolt Against Elite Democracy” and “The Indo-Pacific: Trump, China and the New Fight for Global Domination.”
Not oblivious to grass-based crises and disasters, the Philippines’ reaction to primary calamities has long been hampered by weak and notoriously corrupt bureaucracy. But President Rodrigo Duterte’s disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has reached a new low.
After enforcing one of the world’s longest and strictest locks imposed through the army, the Philippines stands out as one of the region’s hot spots.
In many ways, it’s a crisis that hopes to happen. Chosen with the promise of “real change,” Duterte’s populist crisis-control taste has been marred by a venomous mix of erratic leadership and authoritarian excess.
Despite the tireless efforts of senior officials to minimize the crisis, the number of cases shown of COVID-19 in the Philippines has outperformed even more populous countries such as China and Indonesia. The countries of Asia-Pacific, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are the highest affected.
And thanks to an overly strict blockade that closed up to 75% of economic activity, but still failed to prevent the spread of the virus, the Philippines has just published its worst recorded quarterly economic functionality, with a 16.5% drop in the economy. 3 months at the end of June in the face of a physically powerful expansion of 5.4% for the same time last year.
The impact on daily life has been severe, with a recent survey through the Ministry of Trade and Industry indicating that up to a third of companies were forced to close their doors and unemployment reached an all-time high of 17.7% in April. .
Major cities are now forced to close even tighter closures after the coronavirus outbreak, and it is transparent how the Philippine economy will recover as the country grapps with an unprecedented crisis that has surpassed the country’s physical care formula and ended decades. gains in poverty and underemployment.
As unprecedented as the crisis could be, Duterte’s atypical leadership has seriously undermined the Philippines’ already limited ability to handle a national emergency of this magnitude.
Like other populists around the world, Duterte first stubbornly ignored the pandemic, minimizing its prospect of devastation and undermining the government’s ability to implement preventive measures that have helped so many neighboring countries such as Taiwan and Singapore.
Duterte insisted on allowing the country’s growing online casino industry, known as the Philippines overseas gaming operators, employing thousands of Chinese, to reopen when other critical sectors had to remain closed.
Given the immediate expansion of the industry, which delivers millions of pesos to state coffers each year and serves online players based in mainland China, it is no surprise that weeks after the detection of coronavirus in the Chinese city of Wuhan, Duterte was more involved in protecting China from xenophobic attacks than in protecting its own citizens.
In mid-March, after the Philippines became the first country besides China to record a death by COVID-19 outdoors on the mainland, Duterte took the opposite direction and asked the country’s armed forces to impose a months closure. .
Instead of creating a management organization of leading public fitness experts, Duterte appointed a dozen former generals to oversee control of the COVID-19 crisis. Since taking over the workplace in 2016, Duterte has continually cut public spending on physical care, weakening an already weakened fitness sector, while courting the military by expanding its benefits and wages. To make matters worse, the country’s top fitness agencies, the Ministry of Health, led by a best friend of Duterte’s, and Philfitness Insurance Corporation, led by a formergeneral in Duterte’s hometown of Davao, have been very consistent with allegations of corruption.
Despite the effectiveness and integrity of these very important maximum agencies in combating the pandemic in question, Duterte has largely supported his besiegeed acolytes, mocking his promise to act decisively even in the face of “a smell of corruption.”
Instead of focusing on an evidence-based public aptitude policy and gathering state resources for the relevant agencies, Duterte introduced what amounted to authoritarian lightning war. With public protests and another bureaucracy of civil disobedience carried out virtually through the blockade, Duterte’s allies closed the country’s largest media network and passed a draconian counter-terrorism law through Congress that can be selectively implemented to silence independent voices.
Meanwhile, four months after the crisis began, the government has not yet developed a coherent and consistent stimulus package to restart a hemorrhaging economy, with Duterte putting all hope in the emergence of a vaccine from its allies in China and Russia.
“I hope that until December we will return to normal,” he said with a little luck in a national speech at the end of July in an added English and Tagalog. “I have a vaccine. All I’m asking is that you be patient.
Surrounded by yes-men and other davao’s reduced-priced companions, Duterte stubbornly refused to abandon his failed strategy. All it has caused is the double blow of a public aptitude crisis and an economic collapse in what until a few years ago was one of Southeast Asia’s most dynamic democracies.
Subscribe to our newsletters to get our stories right in your inbox.
You want an Array subscription..