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<img src="https://cdn.kahimyang.com/resources-14/bbm-for-the-people-sm.webp" alt="President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and son President Bongbong Marcos" loading="lazy" />
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(President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and son President Bongbong Marcos)
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In Bongbong's case, it came to the tune of 31 million votes in the 2022 presidential election, the biggest majority vote ever garnered in the history of Philippine elections. And all the way to his inaugural speech at the National Museum, President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Romualdez Marcos Jr. was the knight in shining armor proclaiming to the whole world the success of his lifetime magnificent obsession of "filling the shoes" of his departed father, the late President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos Sr.
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To the resounding cheers of multitudes, Bongbong intoned: 
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"Never forget, we are Filipinos. One nation. One republic. Indivisible. We resisted. And never failed to defeat foreign attempts to break up our country in my father's watch in his first chapter of our history."
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The euphoria with which the inaugural speech of Bongbong had seized the people gained seemingly unstoppable momentum, each decision he announced was met with popular approval. One such decision was his taking over the post of secretary of Agriculture. To the thinking sectors of the populace, this was a most welcome move. It did indicate early on that President BBM knew his priorities. One of the major promises he made during the campaign was to lower the price of rice to P20 per kilogram.
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<h3>
Solve hunger
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Early on, therefore, Bongbong must be aware that to bring peace and order to the country, you must, simply speaking, solve the problem of hunger.
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To the cheers of the throngs at his inaugural, Bongbong intoned, "At sa pangarap na maging mas masinag ang kinabukasan natin at ng ating mga anak, ang pangarap n'yo ay pangarap ko (And in aspiring for a brighter future for ourselves and our children, your dreams are mine)."
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But as one knowledgeable on the subject early on opines, the proof of the pudding about the President's seriousness about solving the unending rice crisis is a clear, immediate program of rice production, like the Masagana 99 which his father launched early in the martial law regime. Suddenly, from a rice-importing country, the Philippines became one of the world's rich suppliers of the cereal and whose development of a special variety of the staple had, in fact, accounted for the development of the rice technologies of the Philippines' neighbors, Vietnam and Thailand, among others.
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How Bongbong is progressing in this regard may be gleaned from observing the conditions obtained in the market. Rice, which for a long time had stood at P10 per cup-size scoop in carinderias now costs P12, a P2 increase within days of the Bongbong inaugural; a saucer of viand (meat or fish) priced P60 before had shot up to P80, and counting. This shows that things are not getting that rosy in the food service sector, and food being the base of all economic activities, the situation must forebode at least the potential, if not yet the imminent transpiration, of what has befallen Sri Lanka, a serious political upheaval brought mainly by decades of economic mismanagement. 
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Yet here what we are talking about is not decades - for the immediate past administration of president Rodrigo Roa Duterte had brought about truly meaningful developments in various spheres of Philippine polity - but just days of already visible dislocations in the nascent Bongbong Marcos administration. A number of earlier agreed infrastructure projects with China have been scuttled for still unclear reasons. His appointed national security adviser retired UP professor Clarita Carlos has created a stir, indicating destabilizing moves in the very delicate security sector. National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict spokesperson Lorraine Badoy has come out into the open claiming that Communist Party of the Philippines-New People's Army-National Democratic Front elements have widely infiltrated the government bureaucracy. Political upheavals tend to follow serious crises in food. It is worth remembering that the downfall of the Romanov dynasty in Russia in 1917 was brought about not by any strong intrinsically political advocacy but by the sheer popular call by the masses for "bread, bread, bread."
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Bongbong had better watch out then. The price of diesel gasoline has shot up beyond the P80 per liter mark, and as tricycle drivers woefully complain, with the fare pegged at the old rates, it's just enough for a trip that hardly gives them a fair return for the consumed fuel. There seems to be no visible end to the Ukraine crisis, therefore no end to the spiraling of the prices of fuel-dependent commodities, particularly food. The President had struck the perfect approach by apparently seizing control of the DA (Department of Agriculture). Now, does he have the resolve to pursue it to immediate fruition? What programs of emergency nature, for instance, are already in place to see to it that his promise regarding the pegging of rice price at the barest minimum is fulfilled? The trade of galunggong, which now costs P300 per kilogram, continues like the rice trade, suffering from grave exploitation by import cartels. And yet, what we have yet to hear from the new President is a stand on how to nationalize basic food necessities.
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<h3>
Redoing history
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We understand, it will take time for the new administration to make its intended programs felt. Precisely, it has been too short a time yet for anybody to be able to judge whether Bongbong is on the right track or not. But food is an immediate people's need and it does not require much deep thinking to bring it to people's stomachs on an immediate, day-to-day basis. When, therefore, we see how Malacañang, instead of focusing on the people's immediate livelihood concerns, seems to be agog over the upcoming presentation of a movie on the last days of the Marcoses in power in 1986, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
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For the people: Filling in his father's shoes