PRESIDENT Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo seized the state luncheon for visiting Swiss President Pascal Couchepin on Monday to spring a surprise on the Filipino people by calling for a shift to a federal system of government as a way out of the impasse over the stymied agreement seeking the establishment of an expanded Bangsamoro homeland in Mindanao.

“We advocate federalism as a way to ensure long-lasting peace in Mindanao,” the President said in a speech that stunned her audience. The speech did not mention the politically dirty phrase “Charter change,” but it served to confirm fears that she is using the worsening Mindanao conflict as an opening wedge for a shift to the parliamentary system that would allow her to remain in power beyond her constitutional term in 2010.

This new initiative came in the midst of the storm triggered by the Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) initialed by the Philippine government peace panel and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) installing a Bangsamoro Juridical Entity clothed with the powers of a sovereign state and seated on an enlarged territory that annexes sizable areas in Mindanao. It came two years after the Supreme Court rebuffed a “people’s initiative,” a desperate last-ditch attempt to amend the 1987 Constitution to introduce the parliamentary system of government.

Explaining the new initiative, Press Secretary Jesus Dureza said federal restructuring was “the way forward” in carrying out the MOA as a framework to end four decades of secessionist war waged by the MILF. He admitted that the President “is calling for a constitutional amendment … in order to bring about the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity.”

Despite the avoidance of the contentious phrase “Charter change,” the new scheme did not disguise the fact that a shift to the federal structure could open the way for the introduction of constitutional amendments that could accommodate changes proposed by the MOA or “riders” proposing the conversion of the presidential system to a parliamentary system.

In this respect, the federal initiative could be seen as a crude attempt to sneak in amendments designed to extend the President’s term under the cover of making the proposed Bangsamoro homeland palatable and placing it within the framework of the Constitution.

The federal initiative was sprung with the stealth, lack of transparency, deviousness and secrecy that characterized the rush surrounding the completion of the MOA and the signing of the MOA, which the Supreme Court aborted on Aug. 5 with its temporary restraining order.

The President gave the public a last-minute hint that the peace agreement with the MILF was in the works when she revealed in her State of the Nation Address on July 28 that on the eve of her speech, “differences on the tough issue of ancestral domains were resolved.” Then she asked Congress “to act on the legislative and political reforms that will lead to a just and lasting peace during our term of office.”

The secrecy and lack of consultations with people in the areas being ceded by the agreement to the expanded Bangsamoro homeland and with congressmen who will legislate measures to implement the agreement have sparked widespread unrest and the petitions by local officials asking the Supreme Court to abrogate the agreement.

The signing ceremony of the MOA in Kuala Lumpur was also hurriedly and almost surreptitiously done. The dignitaries who were invited to witness the ceremony (including Foreign Secretary Alberto Romulo, Presidential Peace Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. and US Ambassador Kristie Kenney) were already airborne when the Supreme Court issued the TRO. The Court gave the government a dose of its own game of springing surprises. The TRO upset the government’s express apple cart. The government appeared to have been too confident that the Court would not pull the rug under its feet.

Although there have been years of “consultations” with local officials and leaders of local communities in Mindanao during the negotiations on the peace process, the draft crystallized only a few weeks before its text was leaked to the public. The draft was hammered out under cover of “executive privilege.” No one had an inkling what it really contained. Even congressmen who were shown copies of drafts days ahead of the State of the Nation Address did not seem to find offensive provisions in it. This suggests that the offensive provisions were introduced at a late stage. The final draft was circulated among a select few, mostly retired military officers. One of them leaked it to the press. When the Philippine Daily Inquirer published the draft on Aug. 4, most people who read it, including those who were in on the previous consultations, were horrified with its contents concerning the territories surrendered to the Bangsamoro homeland and the powers ceded to the BJE.

The shift to federalism as a mode to correct the defects of the controversial Bangsamoro deal is undermined by the fact that it uses constitutional change to achieve two objectives: first, to make the pact acceptable; and second, to pave the way for the shift to a parliamentary system. The conflict sparked by the MOA provisions makes it hard to push the second agenda. These two issues would overload the Charter change, or Cha-cha, process. Besides, two years is too short a time to complete the process of constitutional change. The MOA controversy has already overheated the Cha-cha debate. Already the country is in flames over it.

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