Duterte Harry by Jonathan Miller

Author:Jonathan Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO010000, BIO011000, POL035000, POL035010, POL042030, POL054000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2018-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

As mayor, Duterte cultivated his tough bugoy persona; he liked to pose with guns for the camera, and, with Evasco at his right hand, he pledged to get things done. He delivered. He was credited with slashing red tape, just as he has as president; civil servants were required to process business applications within three days — this, it’s understood, on Evasco’s orders. Those accused of inefficiency or, worse, corruption, were publicly shamed on the mayor’s Sunday TV programme. He himself lived frugally, in a modest wooden house owned by his girlfriend, Honeylet. It backed onto a golf course (where he would later park the helicopter he ‘borrowed’ from a millionaire pastor) in a suburban backstreet. He had no interest in the flashy four-wheel-drives seen everywhere in Davao. Duterte Harry owned a second-hand Harley Davidson, later changed for a low-slung, high handle-barred Yamaha Virago. Flor de Lisa Mercade Sepe, who has worked as his cook, babysitter, and seamstress, paints a picture of a man with simple local tastes in food; he preferred to get old clothes stitched and mended than to throw them away.

I ate out in a couple of the restaurants frequented by Duterte in both Davao and Manila, wondering if it might help me get the measure of the man. As a public prosecutor, he would often lunch with fellow lawyers in a simple place on Piapi Boulevard called Sana’s Carinderia, owned and run by Proferia ‘Sana’ Valles — ‘Sana’ being an affectionate nickname for a married woman in a local language, which is what Duterte called her. Sana is four years older than Duterte, but looks 10 years younger, and she adores the man. She insisted on serving up all ‘the mayor’s’ old Bisaya favourites, including her signature dish — Duterte’s number one — which she’s been making for more than 40 years: tapang kabaw, trimmings of lean carabao (water buffalo), fried and dried and cured with salt. It’s crisp and served up with fish sauce, chilli, salt, and lime; Sana guards her recipe with the ferocity of Colonel Saunders. Her carnivorous feast is eaten with plain rice and set off by a spicy carabao (on the bone) and cabbage soup. Compared with the ubiquitous and awful mall-food that’s become standard Filipino-fare, this is unusually good. So taken was Duterte with Sana and her tapang kabaw that he and the entire Duterte tribe became her regulars. One wall of Sana’s restaurant is plastered with memorabilia, with Sana and her family grinning proudly, draped around the prosecutor-mayor-president. In one fading colour print, Duterte is sitting in his cowboy boots and stone-washed jeans: the Godfather of Davao City, with his godson (one of Sana’s) standing at his shoulder. In another, he’s at a table in her restaurant, in his trademark gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses, being Duterte Harry. Sara and Paolo, Davao City’s mayor and vice mayor, also figure in these pictures, as does Elizabeth Zimmerman, their mother. Sana’s place is a no-frills, what-you-see-is-what-you-get place — completely without ostentation.

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