During his visit to the Philippines back in 2018, the head of our religious congregation (the Jesuits) exhorted a group of Filipino social advocates to build human communities and make decisions for the common good. He went on to say that this can only be made possible by genuine encounters with the poor and marginalized coupled with sound analysis informing policies, programs, and plans. I think this advice is also worth pursuing as a guide and vision for leadership in our country as we gear towards another elections.

The kind of leaders we need to emerge and choose in the coming elections must not just be someone relatable to the masses. More than just earning their support, the leaders we need ought to continue and reimagine programs that will provide opportunities for our disenfranchised and marginalized brethren for their education, livelihood, and welfare.

This priority can be explicitly expressed in budget priorities and strategic actions geared towards beefing up social services that government must provide to its people. To be more effective, our leaders must be astute and need to know how to listen and collaborate with other sectors in society that are also working towards the same goals. This brings to mind the work of education pursued by the government but also of the private sector.

I also wish to highlight the need to provide opportunities for quality steady employment side by side immediate and relevant relief for those who need it. Our next set of leaders need to give more focus on long-term solutions and not simply be content with immediate short-term relief as a response to certain crises and calamities hitting our countries.

'Our next set of leaders ought to have the courage to continue in undoing such injustices even if it means earning the ire of their allies, backers, or even relatives.'

Pope Francis in his recent encyclical Fratelli Tutti reminds us that “this is the finest help we can give to the poor, the best path to a life of dignity” and “political systems must keep working to structure society in such a way that everyone has a chance to contribute his or her own talents.”

We must hold to the highest standards those who seek to serve us in public office for it is in the political that the common good can be easily achieved. Yet, we know very well that if it is abused, political power can also be the greatest threat to our lives and rights.

Pope Francis is aware that providing relief is important, but he would go on to highlight in the same section that “welfare projects, which meet certain urgent needs, should be considered merely temporary responses.” This exhorts to improve the wages of most of our labor force and to ask how vulnerable areas in our country can be made calamity-proof so that relief not be our government’s only solution.

Given what our country has gone through the past years, there is also a need for genuine healing, and this cannot come without accountability and justice. This requires that our next set of leaders recognize the grave injustices committed against certain sectors of society that have been neglected or even abused. Like the families of victims of extra-judicial killings, farmers and fisherfolk who have been alienated from their sources of livelihood and identity, our Muslim and IP brethren who have been displaced from their own lands, and even those who, until now, are very much pained by the loss and abuses that happened during the martial law years.

Such injustices must be acknowledged and corrected if our next set of leaders truly desire healing and building a Filipino nation made up of so many identities. Our next set of leaders ought to have the courage to continue in undoing such injustices even if it means earning the ire of their allies, backers, or even relatives.

I know all these are easier said than done, but we must hold to the highest standards those who seek to serve us in public office for it is in the political that the common good can be easily achieved. Yet, we know very well that if it is abused, political power can also be the greatest threat to our lives and rights.

If our government can fortify these things, we may have little to worry about the threats to our country, whether real or imagined, whether from outside or from within. I guess this is what Pope Francis meant when he said that “education and upbringing, concern for others, a well-integrated view of life and spiritual growth: all these are essential for quality human relationships and for enabling society itself to react against injustices, aberrations and abuses of economic, technological, political and media power.”

All these, I believe, can be part of a longer list of things we need to demand from our future leaders. Then, if all these also become their agenda and they push through with it, we may achieve true peace, one that is marked not just by the absence of violence but also with integral development.

Every voice matters. Register now! Go to irehistro.comelec.gov.ph.