When amateurs are in charge

MANILA
Only the dullest observer would still be thinking Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was being honest when he promised to solve the country’s drug and crime problems, annihilate the state’s ideological enemies, and ride a jetski to the Spratly Islands to spite China, all in three months, during the 2016 election.
He said all of those just to get elected. But over the past several months, Duterte has admitted to just fooling us when he made the overblown promises.
Filipino police are admitting to some 4,000 extrajudicial killings. Sen. Sonny Trillanes and crime watchdogs claim that up to 20,000 drug suspects have been killed. What happened to the 16,000 difference? Maybe Mr. Duterte was being truthful at least about fattening the fish in Manila Bay by dropping dead drug suspects there.
The recent drop in the President’s trust rating proves the people’s realization that all the sweet promises and bold assertions were all empty pledges. What is becoming more and more apparent is that Duterte’s administration is incapable of transforming rhetoric into reality.
Duterte has surrounded himself with at best mediocre people. He himself said he had only a tiny circle of acquaintances from where to recruit senior officials. That small pool of talent is showing its inadequacies.
Crimes in communities still abound. Drugs are still a problem. Mr. Duterte’s drug war was wrong from the start. He and the police conducted their “war” in reverse. They thought they could slay the drug monster by killing drug users and peddlers.
The first thing they should have done was cut off the supply of drugs. Ergo, no supply, no users.
The problems they criticized the previous administration on, like Manila’s horrendous traffic, remain unsolved. Still not enough jobs. In fact, unemployment has gone up further, according to a new survey. The peso-to-the-dollar rate remains in the P50 and up level.
He has given China virtual carte-blanche to a building spree in the West Philippine Sea. This is the only instance of a country winning an international arbitration case and then virtually giving it away afterwards.
He has failed to end “endo,” an exploitative hiring tactic that he promised to scratch immediately if he won the presidency. They’ve just ousted Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, with potential long-term consequences that could ignite a constitutional crisis.
Besides unfulfilled promises so far, Duterte’s people have started to commit blunders that are bound to continually erode his popularity. A recent example of the blunders by his men is the botched rescue of abused Filipinas in Kuwait.
I support government attempts to assist our fellow Filipinos in danger abroad. But such cloak-and-dagger ops are supposed to be done in secret, and by trained operatives. And yet, they videotaped the Kuwaiti rescue themselves for all the world to see, including the Kuwaitis.
They dilly-dallied over the importation of rice to ensure supply in our local markets. They squabbled among themselves and now they can’t find any foreign suppliers.
Administrations start to feel governance fatigue after a couple of years. It doesn’t help when amateurs are at the helm of the ship of state.
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