Just two days before Valentine’s Day in the year 2025, I find myself nauseated by the thought of the midterm elections campaign season.
I had just arrived from a too-short sojourn to the place of my childhood where the green, green spaces enamored me once more. But while I took in the familiar sights, marred here and there by posters of smiling politicians, I looked around and saw some stark sameness where there should have been change — neglected bits and pieces that, for the occasional visitor like me, stuck out like a sore thumb.
Seen against a backdrop of natural beauty mish-mashed with clusters of modernity, old parts of a city can look sad unless they are embraced by development activities. Yet with every change in leadership, it seems the new parts are merely meant to showcase the current leader’s “legacy,” never mind continuity.
And right along with the still-old roads and the still-boring political ads, the names of the candidates struck me as being just the same. Oh, well, I thought — what does it matter if the dynasty is real! What is important is that they are working hard to help improve the lives of the people, right?
Fat chance of that when you have “fat dynasties” living off the fat of the land.
I first came across the term “fat dynasties” in an article written by Carla Teng-Westergaard on the Asia Media Centre site, which defined it as “when numerous relatives of a politician simultaneously hold public office.”
There is also a “thin dynasty,” according to the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ). It is “one in which a political clan is able to manipulate one elected position over time.”
Professor Ronald Mendoza states: “The more fat dynasties you have, the more poverty there’s likely to be.” The executive director of the Asian Institute of Management was quoted as part of a 2013 forum conducted by the PCIJ on Maguindanao: The Politics of Dynasties.
The forum focused on Maguindanao “because it has the most political dynasties,” Malou Mangahas, executive director of PCIJ, said then. Three families in 2010 held court — the Ampatuans, Midtimbangs, and Mangudadatus — all holding both elective and non-elective positions.
Yet despite so many clans heading the province as one blood (which might lead one to assume they are solid in their aim to uplift their hometown), Maguindanao conversely had “so little development.”
Maguindanao, with its memory of a lurid massacre on the way to a filing of a candidacy, is the best example of corruption and the worst of democracy. It is the case study of a Philippines so inundated with political clans — just look into the names in Congress — but “so little development.”
Ruling clans fight for blood to keep their power, and the province continues its descent to poverty. I wonder what kind of promises are given by political clans who have ruled for ages in towns quite riddled with decay. And why voters choose to believe them.
It’s nauseating.