The simple answer, contrary to the convoluted arguments of analysts, is that Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio had to quit because she can’t always get what she wants, as Mick Jagger sang. When narcissists and ambitious politicians can’t get their pork barrel, confidential and intelligence funds (CIF) and perhaps their share of the loot from projects and programs subsidized by taxpayer money, the only proper way to avoid getting treated like dirt is to quit.
Sara has been rendered irrelevant in the Department of Education (DepEd) since her projects and programs are not attuned to the real needs of the millions of pupils and students in the public and private schools. In one particular historical stupidity, the geniuses at the DepEd tried to erase the name Marcos from the Marcos dictatorship, forcing former political prisoner and playwright Bonifacio Ilagan, who was tortured during the dictatorship to quip “anong klase yan, diktadura na walang diktador?” The move earned a deluge of attacks, and the idea didn’t age well.
You can’t blame Sara for that since she is a firm believer of the recently-crafted maxim that “honesty is not needed in politics” but dishonesty is required not only for the now-shattered Team Unity but also to maintain the mountain of lies that form the foundation of political dynasties. Sara, whose forebears are Ashkenazi Jews, apparently forgot that the Jews can forgive, but they do not forget, like the Palestinians who can never forget the Nakba of 1948 and their continuing genocide in Gaza and apartheid in the West Bank. Filipinos may also forgive, but they cannot forget the atrocities of the Marcos dictatorship, or the more than 30,000 victims of Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war, along with 10,000 or so victims of enforced disappearances and summary executions since 2016.
After she was slammed for the P221.4-million of the confidential fund (CF) she secured from Malacanang and quickly spent in the 11 dying days of December 2022, Sara also fumed after the House of Representatives rejected her importuning that the Congress approve her P500-million request for confidential and intelligence funds (CIF) for the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and a separate P150-million CIF for DepEd to better monitor elementary school pupils and high school students who may have a proclivity to join the New People’s Army (NPA.) To prove that she is viscerally opposed to the Communists, she ended up as co-chairperson of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) in May 2023, and government agents immediately swarmed schools, regarded as peace zones globally, to operate against the NPA.
Stripped of her CIFs at the OVP and DepEd, Sara could no longer enjoy the entitlements and royal treatment she luxuriated in when she was Davao City mayor. No one would take the rap for her at DepEd and OVP, and no one could defend the multi-billion appropriations she had hankered for. Then, reports from the Commission on Audit (COA) showed that an army of ghost employees was hired by the Davao City government, and equipment and funds could not be accounted for. The power she exercised for years, which included mauling a court sheriff, was mysteriously being lost after she engaged in a tiff with Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez, the President’s cousin whom she tagged as “Tambaluslos,” the mythical Austronesian forest creature with oversized genitals.
By meddling with Malacanang’s policy decisions, opposing the peace talks with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDF) and keeping a deathly silence on China’s illegal occupation of Panatag Shoal and incursions into Ayungin Shoal (declaring that her brother Rep. Polong Duterte’s statements on the issue would suffice, which means her brother is her surrogate), Sara betrayed her incompetence and proved once again that the Philippine government promotes amateurs to act amateurishly on matters of state. She was a square peg in a round hole, and she cannot justify attending rallies in which Marcos Jr. was ridiculed, mocked, laughed at and insulted.
For sure, no one in Malacanang suggested that Sara resign but many in the inner sanctum of the Palace wanted her to go and expected that she would, once she finds her position untenable. As she trots out the same egregious stand on the issue with China, and her father maintains his incredulity by cowering under the threat of Beijing’s war, Sara has sold the country’s interest down the sewers. For the Dutertes, the Philippines would be better off as China’s province, never mind the fact that there is no historical document to back up Beijing’s claim to 90% of the South China Sea other than the 1947 sketch drawn up by Kuomintang oceanographers on board a US cutter. The Ricci-Li map of 1602 also excluded all lands at the 12th parallel from the territory of the Ming Dynasty, thus destroying any Chinese claim to the Spratlys as the 12th parallel crosses Culion, Palawan. All territories south of Culion in the Philippines were not covered by the Ming Dynasty, contrary to pious wishes of China.
