The Gardener’s Tale of a Whole Different Way of Campaigning
The Gardener had run many electoral campaigns before, with himself and others as candidates or campaign managers, experiencing an almost equal share of “victories” and “losses.”
In the late 1960s, he had only been a few years with the peasant movement when he was assigned to organize the “public affairs department” of the farmers’ federation. “Public affairs”, of course, was synonymous with “political” – a word used in its broad sense, and not in the narrow partisan sense.
Some gardeners steeped in the classics loved to explain again and again the etymology of the word “political”; that it came from the Greek word “polis” which refers to the city, or community of ordinary citizens; that it, in fact, defined the human being (said Aristotle), a living being (“animal”) who necessarily and by choice was “political” (a being with a sense of the polis) and who yet could also freely choose to be by oneself alone (“apolitical”) without the least bit of community reference; that, in this sense, the antonym of “political” was quite simply and humorously the word “idiotic,” referring to an escape into one’s narrow little ego –idiotes in Greek – disinterested, bashful, or simply afraid to get involved in the public arena.
The gardeners recognized early the political character of their basic problem revolving around the issue of ownership of or access to the society’s wealth-producing resources, and their federation, like so many other peasant organizations in generations past, simply could no longer pretend that it was even possible to survive at all without political action.
For the farmers’ federation at that time political action was often quite diverse: ranging from interest group “lobbying” and following up with bureaucracy regarding gardeners’ advocacies and concerns in the law and its implementation, such as fighting against land evictions here and justifying land occupations there, clarifying the application of landlord-tenancy sharing, strongly affirming rights for state support in the area of pre-and post-harvest activity, struggling with unscrupulous landlords, ranchers and logging concessionaires for the right to till the land in peace, writing congress for the passage of certain urgent laws that would improve the gardeners’ condition and, when nothing happened, taking to the streets for marathon demonstrations that could last weeks and months till, sometimes, the electoral season would overtake all activity and the federation would support or oppose certain candidates, either knee-jerk fashion or with great clarity.
The imposition of martial rule in the seventies changed the character of peasant political action with so many of the leaders arrested and martyred or driven into exile and underground actions.
The EDSA peaceful insurrection in the mid-eighties that re-opened the national polity to actions in more civilized modes led to more opportunities and, as well, greater difficulties.
The opportunity to peacefully pursue even radical goals was one thing, but it was completely another thing to be slowed down by money rule, which had now unabashedly replaced martial rule.
EDSA in many ways opened up society to the great oligarchic restoration which, using people power or the collective action of the many, crushed the monopoly made possible by martial rule in favour of an oligopoly made possible by money rule.
Majority rule or democracy took a back seat; it was now more easily used as a mask for oligarchic rule than truly realized in authentic freedom and economic empowerment of the many who remained as poor as ever before.
The masking process was done in regular elections that, more often than not, merely ushered in massive temporary insanity – making so many forget the power and sanctity of the ballot freely cast for one’s own good in favour of the ballot freely sold for immediate gain and long-term pain.
Thus it happens that what is thought to be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people” dies a quick death –“perishes from the earth” – because of its replacement by a “government off the people, buy the people, and fool the people,” the installation of which not even martial rule could do but money rule easily does.
Yes, today’s election is again money versus people. More accurately, it is more powerful money versus less and less concerned people. These are not revolutionary times – no revolutionary mood here, not yet; no revolutionary situation. These are digital times – an age of perpetual distraction, where focus is seldom achieved. It is not easy for an active minority in the face of a sceptical or even cynical majority. And can the active minority hold on long enough to overcome the insanity of vote-selling which in its many forms is really much worse than vote-buying? Can you hear again Jose Rizal’s plaint that “there are no tyrants where there are no slaves?”
That is the big question – the most urgent, the most real question.
Late in the day, very late (from a certain point of view but “never-too-late” in reality) the three biggest national federations of coconut farmers’ organizations confederated into one gigantic Confederation of Coconut Farmers’ Organizations of the Philippines, gathering into their files some three million members nation-wide.
The three had long been competing with and fighting each other (as also did their many member organizations at regional, provincial and town levels) on how to regard the humongous pile of money now known as the “coco levy funds.”
Last year the Supreme Court determined with finality that these funds are owned in trust by the government for the real beneficial owners who are all the coconut farmers of the Philippines with the purpose of establishing and developing the coconut industry out of the coconut anarchy where it is now.
The court doctrine of state trust ownership and farmer beneficial ownership immediately threw the government bureaucracy into turmoil. Debates ensued as to which department would now logically manage these big funds that would yet end up three or four times bigger than the initial amount of seventy-three billion pesos.
The Department of Agrarian Reform argued that it has coconut farmers under its care and it needs more funds than what the General Appropriations Act (GAA) gives in order to start and finish its task of coconut “land acquisition and distribution.”
The Social Welfare Department said that it, too, had coconut farmers under its care and it needed more money to continue its “Conditional Cash Transfer” program.
The lawyer departments, as they may be called, namely, the Office of the Solicitor General and the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) claimed that under some section somewhere of some existing law they were entitled to five and ten per cent respectively of recovered funds for which they played a lawyer’s role – a joint claim that would transfer (illegally) billions of pesos from government special trust funds, such as the levy funds are, to government general funds, which the levy funds are not.
Then, of course, the Department of Agriculture whose Secretary is also the Chairman of the Philippine Coconut Authority was not far behind in pointing out that coconut farmers are in care of his department, and care for them he will if the coco levy funds were released to him.
The coconut farmers are so poor that they are normally invisible in government bureaucratic screens. But not this time – the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC) announced that they have taken cognizance of the coconut farmers’ poverty and, therefore, please, could anybody release to them immediately a little over a billion pesos as cost of their monitoring activities and road-mapping suggestions for how the coco levy funds should be used in order to effectively alleviate rural poverty.
Whom did we miss out on? The levy funds are there now in cold cash – 56 billion in the Bureau of Treasury, with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), and the rest, some 11 billion pesos more, deposited with the United Coconut Planters Bank (UCPB) – earning interest, true enough.
The gardener publicly asked the former National Treasurer if she knew anything about the special trust account for the proceeds from the sale of military camps a few years ago. The good lady said that the account is there all right but the account no longer has any substantial funds. What happened?
Well, in other countries magicians can make rabbits disappear from the proverbial hat – impressive enough. In the Philippines, however, magicians can make even tractors disappear from the customs area and billions of pesos disappear from special trust accounts – faster than the eye can note.
Many gardeners believe only PNoy has prevented magicians from making the billions of pesos in coco levy funds from disappearing to date. Gardeners are thankful, of course. And now the real dialogue begins between the gardeners and PNoy. What is the language of the dialogue?
But, firstly, is it true that coconut farmers are organized nation-wide? If so, can they talk? In how loud a voice? Do they understand that the only language of democracy-in-action, the language politicians understand and use is neither Tagalog, Visayan nor English but the language of the ballot?
The gardener is nervous, a wee bit, but nervous. In the long road from campaign through election to winner proclamation – he has personally dialogued with thousands of gardener leaders across the archipelago who not only agree with the need for coconut farmers to have their own voice in congress, to set up the Coconut Industry Trust Fund out of the levy funds and have it managed by the joint owners: government-as-trust-owner and farmers-as-beneficial-owners in accordance with established Supreme Court doctrine through a Foundation established by law; above all, they seem to agree, too, that May 13, 2013 is their only chance to make this effective assertion.
There is a consensus that if the votes for COCOFED Party List are less than impressive, that is, for instance, if they are less than one and a half million votes – the coconut farmers may as well be ready to kiss the levy funds good bye.
There is no melodrama here – only the simple truth: no congressional voice, no levy recovery for the farmers; no levy recovery, no wherewithal to reform and transform the coconut industry; no vibrant coconut industry, no agro-industrialization of this country; rural poverty remains, overseas working becomes even more than ever before the norm and the “ideal” of fleeing the poverty trap.
What then will keep the farmers from voting to have their own voice? So many of their members cannot be reached because the leaders lack the wherewithal to get to them. And the decision to run came very late in the first place.
Time for a miracle now. The leaders say they will work a miracle yet. In a brief course on miracles shared with them by the gardener, the farmer leaders said and believe that even if they all had only five loaves and two fishes, even if these were all they had but they generously bring all this out now, immediately there will be a miraculous multiplication of the fruits of their generosity. The loaves and the fishes will be multiplied by the very Source of all loaves and fishes who dwell in each one of us human and non-human with enough to satisfy the hunger of thousands.
The winning campaign that moved the many to a sincere resolve to act together must convert soon to a winning election and a speedy proclamation of victory. This can only be made possible not by the power of money which they don’t have in abundance but by the power of spirit, the indomitable human spirit that gardeners treasure and lean on. Gardeners believe that the human is indomitable because it is divine.
If this faith holds on, the gardener is sure the miracle will happen.
Will it? We shall see in two weeks’ time. Peter walking on water could not believe that he was doing it. He almost drowned.
FINIS