Failed People’s Initiative: What went wrong?

I have always cherished what my spiritual director in the minor seminary kept on telling me when I was a minor seminarian: “Start everything right.” He elaborated that in basketball, a player couldn’t make a high percentage lay up if he takes off with the wrong foot and that in farming, good harvest is a result of proper preparation of the soil by cleaning and putting some fertilizer. He went on saying that every good result is a product of a good start.

Such adage was proven in the case of the "People’s Initiative". It was doomed from the very beginning because it took off on the wrong foot (deliberately by self-serving politicians). “People’s Initiative” is a misnomer at its best as most of those signatures were merely attendance sheets signed by people who attended meetings in the barangays. I am privy of such practice specially in the provinces. When I was on the Anti-GMO (genetically modified organism) campaign in the Philippines, we found out that most of those purported petitions by farmers calling for the approval of field tests were attendance sheets on barangay meetings which were later attached to the petition paper the contents of which majority of the farmers said they couldn't comprehend.

I am in favor of charter change, but not in such self-serving manner. Did we ever hear GMA talk about charter change before the Garci Tapes surfaced? NO! It was just one of the best escape routes concocted by Malacanang’s spin doctors. It was a win-win formula suggested by FVR with the advice that GMA should resign before it is implemented. But GMA was not amenable to it and so she insisted on CHACHA with her till 2010.

The "People’s Initiative" to change the constitution failed because it started wrongly, the signatures were obtained wrongly and it was motivated wrongly. The first line of Justice Antonio Carpio’s opinion says it bluntly: “The Lambino group miserably failed to comply with the basic requirements of the Constitution for conducting a people’s initiative.”