Presidential candidate Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte during the Presidential Debates 2016 held in Capitol University in Cagayan de Oro City.聽INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
Presidential candidate Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte on Thursday returned to his roots in Cebu, home to over two million registered voters.
Duterte will proceed to Danao City on Thursday afternoon, where his father, Vicente, served as mayor. Danao is now ruled by the prominent Duranos who are also relatives of the Dutertes.
鈥淲e are really from Danao. We left and went to Mindanao in 1948,鈥� Duterte said in Bisaya when he visited Cebu City last January.
Duterte is expected to meet workers of the Mactan Export Processing Zone. Afterward, he will have a speaking engagement at the Central Technological University in the said city.
If he wins the presidency in the upcoming May elections, Duterte will become the first Cebuano-speaking southern candidate to become the country鈥檚 highest official in more than 50 years.
The last president who hailed from the Visayas was Carlos P. Garcia who was from Bohol. He took over as president when the late President Ramon Magsaysay was killed in a plane crash in 1957.
Garcia later ran in the elections in the same year and served for four years before he was defeated by Diosdado Macapagal in 1965.
Duterte鈥檚 visit to the vote-rich Cebu City aims to woo the Visayan bloc vote.
With over 2.7 million registered voters, the entire Cebu province has the largest voting concentration of electorate in the Visayas and third in the country, next only to Metro Manila and Pangasinan.
鈥淚 will be campaigning in Cebu to bring to our people the reality that nothing much has really changed. We need fundamental and structural changes, otherwise drugs, crime, corruption and poverty will remain,鈥� the tough-talking mayor told
As the county celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Edsa People Power Revolution I, he said many still lived in poverty being neglected by the government.
鈥淭here is clearly a return of the democratic space, where like media is free again, but the economic and social structure remains a lopsided equation in favor of the few and the many are poor and neglected. We restored democracy but it is only for the elite,鈥� he said. RAM
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