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Duterte bides his time

With Covid-19 cases in the Philippines nearing the 2 million mark and three-quarters of the nation’s ICU beds full, one might expect the president to be firmly focused on the present crisis. But that, of course, has never been Rodrigo Duterte’s modus operandi.

Last week, Duterte, 76, surprised few by announcing he would run for the vice presidency when his six-year presidential term ends next year. Taking on the vice presidency, he said, would allow him to finish his ‘crusade’. He would continue his so-called war on drugs and could well wind up holding power by proxy, perpetuating his political legacy.

Duterte has been abundantly transparent about another of his aims. When he floated the idea of a VP bid last month, he claimed it would give him immunity from legal suits. Though legal experts dispute his argument, noting the office carries no protection, most agree a key intention of the run is to evade prosecution. The International Criminal Court is considering a crimes against humanity case in the drug war. If the case is opened, it will almost certainly implicate Duterte, who directed and championed the extrajudicial killings of many thousands of civilians.

But back to the here and now, where mismanagement of the pandemic has left immense suffering. The economy dipped 9.5 per cent last year, leaving millions desperate and destitute. Instead of improving its cash assistance program, the government last week decided to ease the lockdown even as cases continue to grow steeply. While the vaccine campaign has picked up in recent weeks, only around 17 per cent of the population has received at least one dose. Meanwhile, despite entering office on a grandiose anti-corruption platform, corruption continues apace. A recent investigation by the online news website Rappler and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) found that the country’s biggest supplier of PPE, tests, and other pandemic-related medical goods—which has links to ​​Duterte’s former economic adviser Michael Yang—had been flagged by auditors for inflating prices.

Duterte rode into power five years ago on a wave of popular discontent with crime, corruption, and the status quo. Today, frustration is mounting at the government’s poor handling of the virus. The ruling PDP-Laban party has dissolved into factionalism, with one faction already ousting Duterte from the chairmanship. Still, the president remains wildly popular. Which begs the question: what might six more years of Duterte rule bring?

From the archives

No limit

Alice Dawkins

Today’s Beijing is assiduously digitised, connected, monitored and manicured. In some ways it feels like a theme park of itself, where facades scaffold over centuries-old stonework. The skeleton of the city will always be there, but the people who make it what it is are always on the move. As demolition and “renewal” continue to be the city planners’ modus operandi, the memories and stories of locals become even more urgent.

Karoline Kan was born in 1989, in Chaoyang, a village in Ninghe County, northeast of Tianjin. At the time, the county was dotted with 1.6-acre (ten mu) farm plots, famous for rice, reeds and fish. By the end of her memoir Under Red Skies, we see Ninghe’s towns transforming into residential high-rises. Not only does Kan’s rural birthplace integrate into a suburb of Tianjin, but Tianjin integrates into the vast Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei economic zone. Today, the fast train from Beijing slides you into Tianjin in an easy thirty minutes. When passed at 300 kilometres an hour, the surrounding towns and villages blur into a single vision, indiscernible from the train carriages.

As bullet trains reduce travel times and construction erases village pasts, Under Red Skies gives the reader a window into key moments otherwise consigned to rubble. Kan manages both to convey the rapid pace of China’s economic transformation and to capture intimate moments of lived experiences. In ways that hard economic data fail to express, Kan’s childhood memories show us both the ordinary and the extraordinary of daily life.

Read more here

Learn more:

As attacks continue to mount in Afghanistan—amid the hasty withdrawal of US forces and Taliban takeover of Kabul—many Afghans are in desperate need of support. Quartz has an excellent roundup of worthy organisations to donate to, while the International Journalists’ Network has a rundown of how best to support Afghan journalists.

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