Once in a while, we try to understand how we get the leaders we get. Unfortunately, it happens more often in the Philippines. Some have been okay, some better, but, lately, it’s more “what the heck?” than anything else.

Take the current president, for example. We all know how he got elected. What we want to know is why? He says it’s all God’s fault. Of course, it can’t be that simple but in a country that is 70-ish percent Catholic or 80-ish percent Christian, such a statement has a logic of its own. We think we get the leader we deserve as God in His infinite wisdom decrees. To my mind, however, the two do not necessarily go together. We get what we deserve because we chose our leaders. God in His infinite wisdom will not interfere with the exercise of our freedom of choice. The Bible though might say otherwise.

Take King Saul, for example. Called to be king of all Israel and anointed by God’s prophet at the request of the people, he brought great ruin to the nation. “Saul” may not even be his name because that means “called for” or “asked for” since Israel was crying out to God for a king. According to the archeologist David Rohl, it is likely Labayu, which means Great Lion that is perhaps fitting for a king known to have fought bravely against the Philistines. Saul was said to be unskilled in diplomacy using inappropriate language although in his case it was more about using Hebrew rather than Akkadian. In the end, this man, hailed to be the first king of Israel, eventually led his army in a disastrous battle where three of his sons were killed and he committed suicide so that we wouldn’t fall into his enemy’s hands.

The point is that even if you are hailed to be the head of a state as king or president, it doesn’t necessarily mean you will do well at it or that you even finish it, or at least it may not end the way you thought it would. Saul/Labayu was king but he took his own life after the death of his sons in battle. Joseph Ejercito/Erap Estrada was elected president of the Philippines but was ousted from it about halfway through his term in office. I don’t think God is so cruel as to have imposed such leaders upon their respective nations. We made them our leaders and things went bad for them. God can only do so much for the leader or the nation.

Instead, it is up to the leader to actually do everything in his power to help his people. When David became king of Israel, he wasn’t perfect. He made mistakes. Yet, he found his way back to God and is remembered as a great king. Our president has a long way to go. He has decided to quit cursing. That’s a start. I do hope that sometime soon he will realize that drug users are human beings entitled to their full human rights. The fact that their reasoning and actions may have been affected by the drugs does not mean they are any less human. To get them away from drugs, we need to treat them as humans. When they start feeling more human, they don’t need drugs anymore. Killing them is just another way of giving up on them and that’s more a statement about us than about them.

The president is unconventional to say the least. He has his way and, sometimes, it works. More often, it doesn’t. Running a country needs more than just bravado. Machismo can only take you so far. It is easy to bluff your way through one meeting after another but, after a while, it all piles up and puts you in a corner. There are just some things you have to put in order, and you just have to learn how to lead your people. Filipinos who hold dual citizenship are still Filipinos and he is still their president whether he likes it or not, or vice versa. We need a shepherd.

Take Jesus, for example. The good shepherd. He knows His sheep and His sheep know Him. Like the current president, His ways causes disagreements and fights. However, the one thing that differentiates the two, I mean the most glaring one as there are legion, is the fact that Jesus is motivated by love, for all. He sees everyone equally…as human beings that can be saved. Our president prefers to kill three million drug users rather than save them. His drug war has caused the death of over 3,000 Filipinos in around four months. We need him to be a good shepherd: to help us all and not just those he likes. We may be asking too much of this man but this is what it takes to be the president of this Republic.

We don’t need the president to be a philosopher-king. We don’t need him to be perfect. We just need him to be to be the president of all Filipinos.