The Office of the Vice President (OVP) has a full battalion of security personnel – soldiers and police officers.
These soldiers and police officers will be more productive serving the Republic – running after communist insurgents and criminals on the street – than protecting Sara Duterte-Carpio and her family.
Is there a threat against Sara and her family, or is the security detail based on her whim and caprice?
Her predecessor, Maria Leonor Robredo, had less than 100 security personnel assigned from the Presidential Security Group (PSG).
Last year, Sara created her own Vice Presidential Security Group to provide round-the-clock personal protection for her and her family.
Sara must be very insecure and afraid she might be harmed and would not be able to succeed President Ferdinand Marcos Jr when his term ends in June 2028.
Independent opinion polls have shown the vice president would likely be elected the next president in 2028 as Sara leads the pack of potential candidates with nearly 30 percent of the respondents asked about their preference.
Sara has been giving Filipinos a preview of what kind of leader she will be if elected as president in 2028.
Like her father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, she can be dictatorial in her decisions while hiding behind democratic institutions.
For instance, she has issued educational policies, as the secretary of education, without consulting stakeholders – teachers, students and parents – when she ordered the decluttering of public schools’ classrooms.
She had requested a huge amount of confidential funds for her two offices – the OVP and DepEd – because she wanted to step up surveillance of student recruitment by the communist rebels.
It would be absurd if the rebels recruited grade schoolers – the bulk of students in the public school system – to the communist movement.
Nearly 24 million students have enrolled this year but less than 15 to 20 percent of them are in the tertiary level, the potential recruits to the rebel movement.
But the rebels would be lucky if they could convince 1 percent of the tertiary-level students to join the New People’s Army.
However, Sara’s office had requested more than P100 million in confidential funds under the Deped’s proposed budget for 2024.
Sara has no other job as vice president but to wait for the president to be incapacitated or die in office. She serves as a spare tire.
It is not her job to run after communist rebels. She better leave that job to the professionals – soldiers and police officers.
The Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police need the intelligence and confidential funds more than her own offices.
Thus, she can dismantle her own private security group and reassign soldiers and police officers back to their mother units where they can perform their mandated jobs to serve and protect the Filipino people and the country.
Sara’s huge personal security details are an arrogant display of power. She was likely following the footsteps of her father, probably her role model as a public official.
Her father ruled Davao City for more than two decades with an iron fist. He did not tolerate dissent and used a death squad to silence his critics and political opponents.
Sara had displayed her own power when she hit a court sheriff who disobeyed her orders to stop the demolition of a shanty town in the city.
Sara must give up her confidential funds and reduce her own personal security details. She is not the commander in chief and she is not even in the chain of command. She is not entitled to a battalion of security personnel. It is excessive. It is an anomaly.
She could be misusing her own offices and wasting precious government resources in allowing soldiers and police officers to guard her and her family instead of the Republic.
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