President Rodrigo Duterte set a new record on Monday with his final State of the Nation Address as the longest annual report of a Philippine leader since the restoration of democracy in 1986.
Duterte delivered his last SONA -- a 2-hour 43-minute speech -- that emphasized discussions on his administration's war on drugs rather than new initiatives to combat the looming surge of COVID-19 infections due to the highly contagious Delta variant.
The 76-year-old leader broke the record of his immediate predecessor, the late Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III, with this year's speech that was expected to steer the country into pandemic recovery. Prior to his final SONA, Aquino's 2015 report to the nation was the longest post-martial law era at 135 minutes.
"By far this is the most beautiful SONA crowd that ever happened here," Duterte said in the opening spiel of his final SONA.
Much of Duterte's speech dwelled on his war on drugs -- which is viewed as his defining legacy even if the program is haunted by controversies of human rights violations.
"I’ve been asked the question and several times I gave the answer. I am a Filipino and I love my country. I do not want my country in disarray because of drugs. I do not want families break up and become dysfunctional. Iyon ang masakit sa akin," he said.
Duterte delivered his final SONA under the cloud of the coronavirus pandemic -- which was expected to be the center of his speech.
The firebrand leader, the first from Mindanao, will enter his final year in office with the Philippines economy in its deepest recession since World War II. Debt-watcher Fitch Ratings last week downgraded the country's credit outlook due to rising borrowings.
The pandemic struck in Duterte's last two years in office and has killed over 26,000 Filipinos and plunged millions into poverty.
Nearly half of Filipino families or 49% view themselves as poor according to a June 2021 Social Weather Survey. Of the estimated 12 million "poor" families in June 2021, 1.8 million were "newly poor," SWS said, meaning they only considered themselves as poor during the term of President Duterte.
Before COVID, Duterte trumpeted the gains of his war on drugs, his centerpiece program that got him elected in 2016.
While Duterte thanked frontliners and urged Filipinos to "pray" for the end of the pandemic, his speech fell short of providing details on how his government plans to accelerate vaccinations to cover at least half of the country's 109 million people this year. So far, authorities have fully vaccinated over six million.
Without going into the specifics of his 2022 political plans too, Duterte simply closed his final SONA with a simple: "Together let us rise as a nation."
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