Like his father, Vice President Sara Zimmerman Duterte typifies what Mao Zedong said were the villains of Chinese society who make trouble and fail, make trouble and fail again until they eventually fall from the precipice.
Take her latest disastrous episode, the “Isang Kaibigan” children’s book that the Office of the Vice President (OVP) wants to publish using a P10-million budget, as if the OVP has everything to do with storytelling and read-alongs. She should have published what is essentially a picture book when she was at the Department of Education (DepEd) but instead, she clashed with classroom walls and teaching aids hanging near blackboards. After she quit her DepEd posting, Sara lost the chance to write children’s books on the taxpayers’ dime.
Next, she posited the theory that journalists and photographers should be banned from airports to prevent them from “intruding” into the privacy of passengers, like her and her entire family when they documented to be leaving the National Capital Region (NCR) when it was being battered by Typhoon Carina on July 24, 2024. But since Sara is not a queen, princess or empress dowager and is instead a lawyer, an elected public official and an equal of any other Filipino citizen, her calamitous suggestion was laughed at and dismissed as part of another hissy fit after a supermoon. Freedom of the press ends where her nose begins.
To refresh her memory, the Philippines is not monarchy and Davao City is not Dutertistan, so she better abide by the rules and stop pontificating that as an elected public official, she can say whatever she wants to say, no matter how ridiculous it is and subversive of decency. She can be as thin-skinned as Donald Duterte, or as “muy grueso” for demanding that battalion-level security force not be touched. It is also typically stupid of the Senate to pass the OVP’s P2.037-billion budget for 2025 with an intact P500-million “intelligence” fund, the kind of money that her father, the unlamented ex-president Rodrigo Duterte denied to former Vice President Leni Robredo. For failing to answer intelligently the queries of a senator about her picture book, the Senate should have scrapped the P10-million allotted for the book. Sen. Risa Hontiveros was accused by Sara of “politicking” when she asked valid questions about the publication of “Isang Kaibigan.”
While the amount appears to be a spit in the ocean compared to the P221.424-million that the Office of the President (OP) released in the dying days of December 2022 to tide the OVP over, it is nonetheless egregious, to say the least, for the OVP to spend P10-million from the taxpayer vault for a book allegedly plagiarized from “Owly: Just a Litle Blue,” the second in a series of children’s books by author Andy Runton and published by Top Shelf Productions since 2004. Eagle-eyed Filipino writer Ninotchka Rosca posted the cover “Owly: Just a Little Blue” and this was the book’s description: “Owly Just a Little Blue is the second book in the graphic novel Owly series by Andy Runton. Owly discovers a new bluebird and decides to build a home to help it. It’s not an easy task to build or to make friends with the new bird family. But, Owly is determined and kind.” So, there’s your case, counsel.
To claim that it has been copyrighted in 2023 does not exculpate the author or the ghostwriter of copying the work of Runton. The striking similarity of Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio’s magnum opus to the work of Runton, which talks of friendship and generosity and the building of homes, cannot escape readers who have already queued in bookstores to buy Runton’s book. The distributor, Scholastic Philippines, has run out of copies. The drawings of Runton’s book will just show the Sara defenders that they have been had by the supposed ghostwriters and illustrators of the picture book.
With Sara’s spokesman saying that the book will cost P50 apiece, the print run would be for as minimum of 200,000 copies, a huge volume if you ask members of the Indie Publishers Collab Philippines, which slammed the privilege accorded Sara while their members have to scrounge for cash to have their work published. “Here we are, burning our brows to come up with exceptional books with a diversity of stories and topics that reflect the Filipino experience and culture, but we only have resources to print and distribute 20 to 300 copies at a time as we rely on our very shallow pockets,” the group said. “We believe our locally published books are an exceptional addition to public school libraries and contribute to the growth of Philippine literature. But without Duterte’s audacity, will we be awarded a P10 million budget to produce over 20 titles for distribution to over 1,000 public school libraries? We don’t think so,” it added.
Between now and 2028, Sara can crisscross the entire country using the helicopters and jets of Pastor Apollo Quiboloy y Carreon to distribute her “obra maestra” to please at least 200,000 nursery and preschool children and their parents, kith and kin and neighbors, all of them voters, and promote the idea that reading and storytelling shape young minds and make them great minds later on. Yet, the question remains: Why borrow ideas, why copy published books. Being a writer and a legitimate author requires originality, a sense of humor and creativity. These things differentiate genuine authors from ghostwriters. They do put flesh on the bone, not the bone that creates fruit as bad as the tree from whence it came.
