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Sereno: Duterte not God, shouldn't be worshiped as one


President Rodrigo Duterte is no deity as far as ousted chief justice and his vocal critic Maria Lourdes Sereno is concerned.

In a television interview Thursday night, Sereno warned of giving the chief executive "so much power" and raised grim possibilities in the event of an unexpected death, in sustained critique of the man she believes had a hand in her ouster.

"Alam mo ang possibility d'yan [ay] civil war. Or, gagawa ng batas, he will say, 'eto lang ang ang pwedeng successor ko,' without consulting anybody. That's dangerous. So these are not just simple questions. We as a people have to discuss this one by one," she said in an interview over One News.

She raised the question of how much the public should "trust him (Duterte) with the power to reorganize all government," in a possible reference to the administration's moves toward a shift to a federal type of government.

"He is not God. He is not to be worshiped as God," Sereno, a Christian known to invoke religious themes in public statements, said.

"He does not have the exclusivity of wisdom God has designed us as a Filipino nation to be participative in determining what the direction our country would take," she added.

Meanwhile, Sereno kept her answer non-categorical — "I'm weighing things" — when asked if a political career was on her horizon after her disqualification from the Supreme Court's Office of the Chief Justice attained finality. 

She said she wants the Duterte administration to "backtrack and reflect on its basic approach to governance" — what she called ruling by the "sheer will of one man."

"Go back to the rule of law," she said, when asked about reforms. — Nicole-Anne Lagrimas/MDM, GMA News

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