Lessons to Learn: Assessing Gustavo Petro’s First Year as an Educator-Politician

A politician is above all an educator. He presents the country with a vision of what it is, and an improved version of what it can be like. He teaches people to understand their problems and proposes solutions. How good an educator-politician has Gustavo Petro been? What lessons does your first year in power leave for Colombians? Let’s see some:

1. Tact and decorum are not good diplomacy. Whoever is in charge has the prerogative of being late or not attending meetings, missing work for days, even if he is in a foreign country. Leaving mayors, governors, magistrates of the high courts, Spanish businessmen and the presidents of the United States and France, among other people.

2. Traveling abroad several times a month is fine. Although Nariño, and, for that matter, half the country, has the roads blocked, kidnappings have quadrupled and extortion has taken over fields and cities. Telling abroad his version of governing is better than governing.

3. Entrepreneurs are the cause of almost all evil. You have to be wary of them, because they work for profit. profit is bad. Those who defend businessmen are unpatriotic, middle-class careerists, or even slaveholders.

4. The things that people want to obtain in life should be asked of the State.

5. If the State does not give it to them, they must protest and burn something, a bus for example; or break something, a Transmilenio station; or rob something, a supermarket; or interrupt something, a road. The State will rush to meet their demands.

6. The good is the public. Public employees are good. Maybe some do not work, but they are good, because they are public. They do not have to know about public administration, or their sector. They must know how to interrupt, hinder and be suspicious of businessmen in their sector.

7. Companies must always be required to charge less. The energy should cost less, the diesel not to mention, the credits the same, and the SOAT half. Everything must be worth less, even if the companies do not recover the costs.

8. If the companies disappear, the State will take over. That will be good because it will no longer be a business and it can be sold at a low price. They will be managed by public officials instead of businessmen.

9. Unions are good. Anything that can be unionized should be unionized. One should not remember what happened with the Ports of Colombia, Telecom, National Railways, Public Companies of Cali and many others, which were intervened or liquidated because they could not pay their labor and pension debts.

10. Pensions must be public. Pensioners should be given much more than they saved throughout their working lives. That will be paid by the State, and taxes will be taken from well-paid professionals and companies. It does not matter if in a few years there is no left of one or the other. Private companies will be blamed for not contributing enough.

11. Health should be managed by the Government, not by the private sector. It must be managed by mayors and governors. They do not know about health, nor about medicines, hospitals, high-cost diseases or doctors. There is a great risk that a good part of what we contribute to health will be stolen. But at least they are civil servants. Remember that everything public is good. Even if they steal.

12. The land, three million hectares at least, must be redistributed. So they can’t help the peasants, nor do they know what they are going to do with it. The important thing is to distribute it. Many will sell it again. It doesn’t matter. It will have been redistributed and that is what is important.

13. A minister, any day, arbitrarily, can define that the tolls will not increase this year, contrary to what was agreed in the concession contracts. This has serious consequences for their economic balance, the ability to finance them and the stability of the rules of the game. If a minister wants to ignore it, it is his prerogative.

14. It is one thing to talk about a popular economy and quite another to build an economy with a popular effect. The former only demands the willingness to deliver things. The second demands a functioning economy. Even if the economy does not work, you have to deliver things, even if at some point there is nothing to deliver. Entrepreneurs will be blamed for not producing them. Isn’t that what they know how to produce?

15. The whims, although expensive or pharaonic, are a vision of the State. The underground Bogotá metro (and not elevated) and the train (that is elevated) between Buenaventura and Barranquilla may be priceless and difficult to build. But they are whims. That’s why they will be done. Oh, instead, highways and gasoline are for rich and middle-class careerists.

16. If the companies that were going to carry out wind projects in La Guajira leave due to disorders in the communities, which the Government did not solve, Ecopetrol will buy the projects and will have the state monopoly of that energy. Ecopetrol is good because it is public and has many unions.

17. It should not be remembered that Ecopetrol pays for this with profits from oil and gas; nor that Colombia’s oil and gas will soon be made to disappear. Nor that when it generates wind energy it will be forced to sell it at a lower price. What matters is that it is public and that it is delivered cheaply to the people.

18. Anything goes. If anything was valid for the Uribistas, the Santistas and the Duquistas, anything was also valid for the Petristas. Or if not, what is the use of winning the elections.

19. For total peace it is worth rewarding all sorts of criminals. For social sensitivity it is worth wasting taxpayers’ money. For the change it is worth politicking the same as in the last hundred years.

20. The popular word fixes everything: popular pedagogy fixes bad education. Popular economy fixes the bad economy. Popular peace settles the war everywhere. In a country of semantics, the unpopular becomes popular, just to call it that.

In short, the quality of an educator is measured by the number of epiphanies that he produces in his students. For how it helps them to discover, to discover themselves, to be passionate about knowing. The epiphanies of the educator-politician Petro are terrifying. It is difficult to see how the country he will leave in 2026 can be governable. Not that he is a pioneer in that.

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