I wholeheartedly agree with you that wrong identification of problems produces wrong results. But when I hear you spoke before a military crowd during the turn over ceremony of the AFP Chief of Staff urging our soldiers to tell you what they want & you will give it to them, I was awkwardly disturbed because such pronouncement is a sort of taming the AFP so as to avoid military rebellion. Please dear President, do not follow the footstep of the previous fake President GMA who would immediately dangle salary increase whenever reports of military unrest be it “scripted or real” cropped up. You need not resort to such gimmickry because it is very much insulting to the integrity of our soldiers. Our soldiers are professional, loyal and dedicated servants. They are not mad dogs who will irresponsibly launch an uprising just because salary increase is not granted. Gone are the days of GMA’s bribed galore just to hold on to her usurp authority. You are our legitimate President with an overwhelming mandate to start with, so there’s no point of worrying about military unrest.
My point dear President Noy is that it is not the rate of soldiers’ pay that spawned disgruntlement & frustration. It is the Senior Officers’ shabby treatment to our soldiers as if these soldiers are not human beings or mere commodities of war and their continued barefaced practice of wholesale corruption coupled by arrogance of rank that breed hopelessness across the Armed Forces. I must admit in factual terms that soldiers are actually well-compensated contrary to what has been propagated on purpose. Additionally, the AFP & the Police are the most pampered government institutions in terms of remuneration which undeniably become the envy to the teaching community & other government employees considering that many of our soldiers are undergraduate individuals. Let me assure you Sir that your soldiers are and will always be one of your reliable assets in fulfilling your patriotic dreams and aspirations for our downtrodden people & bedraggled nation. But if in your Presidency it is just “business as usual” governance then it is not far-fetched that you too will be confronted with the same dreaded & disastrous military adventurism in three to four years time because as I have said the grounds for soldiers’ disheartenment remain embedded system-wide in the military bureaucracy. So the moment National Politics go awry, simple disgruntlement will soon morph into a violent movement by some messianic elements of our society due to their myopic interpretation of patriotism/nationalism or selfish belief of fixing the broken cord of national dignity that was destroyed by mischievous leadership, mistrust, neglect, hopelessness & ineptitude so to speak.
If I will sarcastically illustrate my point, military uprising or coup d’etat for that matter can never be removed from the political equation even if the country’s entire national budget is exclusively allocated to the AFP & the Police unless an honest to goodness reforms particularly the “doable” ones are immediately & systematically implemented. So I beg you sir to please take a realistic picture of the general sentiments of ordinary soldiers direct from them but in a most professional approach of course rather than relying on the words of Senior Officers. I hate to say this but the AFP is not only composed of powerful but predominantly scheming Generals & bootlicking Colonels. It is also composed of damn idealistic & hibernating Junior Officers, voiceless Enlisted Personnel and helpless dependents & pensioners.
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