MELBOURNE, Australia (MindaNews / 5 March) – The rationale for the imposition of a specific time frame for elected office was best expressed by a member of the Constitutional Commission (ConCom) which drafted the 1987 Constitution.[]
Mr. Edmundo G. Garcia made the following argument during the debates on this very particular issue—
“I know that some of us here have been in politics for a long time and I do not wish to offend them. But I simply think that there should be no special caste of professional politicians. It should not be a life-time profession or a career, but rather an opportunity for public service to be broadened to as great number of people and there should be no effort to accumulate power. Accumulation of power, at one time, really brings about the desire to accumulate more, and rather than providing a structure or a setup which strengthens this trend, the alternative must be to provide structural safeguards for this kind of practice. Therefore, I would not subscribe to more than one reelection for Senators and more than two reelections for Representatives or local officials.” [See Journal Record of the Constitutional Commission of 1986, Volume Two, July 24, 1986, p219.]
Obviously, the rule on term limits was conceived to be a “safeguard” against the propensity of local elected officials to accumulate political power during (and even beyond) their term in office. It was envisaged to be a mechanism to prevent the creation of a “special caste of professional politicians” or in current parlance, political dynasties.
I do not know where Mr. Garcia is today but I bet he would be very upset to know that the rule on local term limits has actually failed to prevent these very contingencies. Indeed, all of the ConCom members would be profoundly flabbergasted to see that the imposition of term limits itself has motivated politicians to use members of their family to circumvent this rule.
This ploy is impressively described with accuracy by the Colombian academic, Pablo Querubin, in an article published in the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies last October 2011 entitled, Political Reform and Elite Persistence: Term Limits and Political Dynasties in the Philippines—
“In the province of Bukidnon, Jose Zubiri Jr. served in congress between 1988 and 1998. Upon reaching his term limit, his son Juan Zubiri took his seat in congress. Jose successfully ran for governor in the 2001 election. After his victory, two members of the Zubiri family were in power in Bukidnon. In 2007, Juan reached his term-limit in congress. However, unlike the Romualdo family (illustrated in Figure 2), Juan did not switch offices with his father. Instead, his seat in congress was taken by his brother Jose Zubiri III and Juan became a senator. With three members of the Zubiri family involved in politics, the family had managed to increase its sphere of influence despite term limits. In short, these examples underscore that the response and adaptation of dynasties to term limits may enhance the political power of these families as their scope of influence increases both in terms of the number of family members involved in politics and in the number of elective offices controlled.”
Indeed, traditional politicians have found a way to beat the three-term limit set forth in Section 8 of Article X of the Constitution by employing the revolving door scheme amongst family members. Concomitantly, they have also expanded the reach of their political power by establishing a public governance syndicate described by respected Mindanao civil society activist, Guiamel Alim, as a “clan-inclusive government”.
The said phenomenon is unequivocal proof that the three term limitation for local elected officials has actually facilitated the least desirable result for our political system—the unabated reign of political dynasties. This is indeed a clear demonstration of a dire pathology in the 1987 Constitution.[]