Forming a unicameral legislature, that would in effect scrap the Philippine Senate, tops Gilberto Teodoro’s presidential agenda.

Gilberto Teodoro with his Xavier School classmates who promise to help him win - photo by Raissa Robles

The 45-year-old defense secretary told Asian Dragon magazine that he was running for the nation’s highest office “because a lot of people want me to become president (and) I think I can do some other things before I quit public service.”

The slender, six-foot tall Teodoro exudes confidence and an easy charm that seems to project only one message — “believe in me, I’m the one.”

“I’d like to reform society, transform the political structure, reform public governance, to put it that way,” he said.

Apparently realizing that the phrase “reform society” sounded too much like buzz words from the late strongman President Ferdinand Marcos, he shifted gears and said, “Not society but public governance.”

Teodoro believes constitutional change is key to securing the nation’s political and economic future: “It’s the only thing that should be done. Public governance. We must transform. If not, we would just be in the same system as now. Forget it.”

Among the 2010 presidential candidates, Teodoro is alone in aggressively pushing it as his main platform of government. His proposals are similar to those being pushed without success by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and the House of Representatives, which she has dominated.

One charter revision Teodoro is batting for is the partial lifting of the ban on foreign land ownership. His advocacy was borne out of his experience as a congressman of nine years and as a defense secretary for two years.

“I do not want a strictly presidential (form of government); it does not work in this country. And a bicameral presidential does not work,” he said. “It (the structure) could be parliamentary, (it) depends on the sense of the Constitutional Convention,” which he would ask Congress to convene immediately if he wins.

The bottom line is, “I’d like a more synergistic structure” in which there is “unity of effort, of cooperation” between and among those who make the laws and those who implement them.

He’s familiar with how a unicameral legislature works. For eight years since he was 14, his mother Mercedes served as an assemblywoman at the unicameral Batasang Pambansa that Marcos created in 1978 to lend his dictatorship a veneer of democracy.

Teodoro regrets the day his late aunt, former President Corazon Aquino, threw out Marcos’ 1973 Constitution and replaced it with a “reactionary” charter. “I’ve studied the (1987) Constitution for a long, long time,” he said. “It looks back. It just corrected everything… Marcos did. It did not provide a mechanism for the future.”

Teodoro believes Marcos was “wrong in declaring martial law” even though his uncle, businessman Eduardo “Danding” Cojuanco, was part of Marcos’ inner circle. Cojuangco heads the National People’s Coalition, of which Teodoro was a member before he bolted to join the Administration’s Lakas and be its standard bearer.

He said martial law “just prolonged the agony.” Marcos should have simply waited for the Constitutional Convention, in which Teodoro’s mom was a delegate helping draft a new charter. “And if the Constitutional Convention completed its work, (and) the Constitution was properly ratified, we would have had a good Constitution in 1973, except for the economic provisions.”

Asked if he could turn out like Marcos who was elected president at 47, Teodoro replied, “People have experienced what Marcos had done.” Besides, he added, “I’m a different person.”

“Marcos had a very, very strong sense of history. I don’t share that… I don’t keep a diary. I’m not that kind of a leader,” he said. “I’m a consensus builder leader. I’m not a dictator unless there’s something that has already been agreed upon and I need to enforce it.”

“I don’t intend to be a Roman conqueror. I intend to do what I can, contribute what I can, then go while I’m still young,” he said.

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