‘With humility, I accept the people’s mandate’

DAVAO CITY, Philippines – With the burdens of the nation soon to rest on his shoulders, Davao City Mayor Rodrigo yesterday promised to give his best in his new role as he pleaded tearfully for help from his parents before their graves.

“It’s with humility, extreme humility, that I accept this, the mandate of the people,” Duterte told Agence France Presse as the unofficial count showed him on a sure path to become the nation’s 16th president. “What I can promise you is that I will do my very best not just in my waking hours but even in my sleep.”

Duterte may have spewed vitriol to win votes and terrify his enemies. But to get things done as president, he said he needed guidance from his departed parents.

He visited the tombs of his father, former Davao governor Vicente Duterte, and mother Soledad Roa at the cemetery in this city.

Duterte embraced and kissed the tombs of his parents, weeping unabashedly while asking for their help as he takes on the biggest challenge in his career as a public servant.

“Tabangi ko, Ma (Help me, Ma),” Duterte cried to his late mother, Nanay Soling, a public school teacher.

Duterte admitted to media he was a mama’s boy and that he really misses his mother.

He said he prefers to be called “President Rody,” the nickname his mother gave him.

“Don’t call me Digong. I want Rody,” he told The STAR.

The mayor said he needs the help and guidance of his late parents as the task before him is so enormous.

Duterte, who garnered more than 15 million votes in last Monday’s polls, won all his past 11 forays in the electoral process. He had also served as congressman.

Visiting his parents’ tombs has been Duterte’s habit for many years. Aside from having served as congressman, Duterte had also been a city prosecutor and vice mayor.

The longtime mayor of this city hypnotized millions with his vows of brutal but quick solutions to the nation’s twin plagues of crime and poverty, which many believed had worsened despite strong economic growth in recent years.

And after a record turnout of voters last Monday, Duterte scored a commanding victory, according to data released by the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV).

With 88 percent of the vote counted early yesterday morning, Duterte had an insurmountable lead of 5.84 million votes over his nearest rival, administration candidate Manuel Roxas II.

Duterte had 38.6 percent of the vote, with Roxas at 23.12 percent and Sen. Grace Poe in third with 21.76 percent, according to PPCRV. Poe had conceded after midnight yesterday.

Duterte, a pugnacious 71-year-old, surged from outsider to the top of surveys with cuss-filled vows to kill tens of thousands of criminals, threats to establish one-man rule if lawmakers disobeyed him and promises to embrace communist rebels.

He also boasted repeatedly about his Viagra-fuelled affairs, while promising voters his mistresses would not cost a lot because he kept them in cheap boarding houses and took them to short-stay hotels for sex.

Duterte caused further disgust in international diplomatic circles with a joke that he wanted to rape a “beautiful” Australian missionary who was killed in a 1989 prison riot, and by cursing the pope.

President Aquino, whose mother led the democracy movement that ousted Ferdinand Marcos three decades ago, had warned repeatedly the nation was at risk of succumbing to another dictatorship.

“I need your help to stop the return of terror in our land. I cannot do it alone,” Aquino said in an appeal to voters in a miting de avance for Roxas in Quezon City last Saturday.

On the same day in his own miting de avance, Duterte repeated to tens of thousands of cheering fans his plans to end crime within six months of his presidency.

“Forget the laws on human rights,” said Duterte, who has been accused of running vigilante death squads in Davao.

“If I make it to the presidential palace, I will do just what I did as mayor. You drug pushers, hold-up men and do-nothings, you better go out. Because as the mayor, I’d kill you.” Another key message of Duterte’s campaign was his pledge to take on the elite, even though his vice presidential runningmate Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano was from one of the nation’s richest and most powerful families.

Various trade unions, meanwhile, welcomed Duterte’s imminent rise to the presidency.

Sonny Matula, president of the Federation of Free Workers (FFW), said the Filipino people, especially workers, are looking forward to a change for the better under a Duterte presidency.

“May he initiate a healing presidency to unite our divided nation,” Matula said.

“May his administration bring those who have less in life to have more in law and more opportunities to be lifted up from the squalor of never ending poverty,” he added. – Mayen Jaymalin