MANILA, Philippines — “I just feel like a beauty queen not a soldier.”
This was how presidential daughter and Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte ended her answer during Wednesday’s confirmation hearing of her ad interim appointment to the rank of colonel of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) Reserve Force.
Sara, alongside 21 other AFP officers, faced a committee of the Commission on Appointments (CA) in a public hearing to deliberate on their ad interim appointments.
In what seems to be a lighthearted exchange between the Davao City mayor and members of CA’s Committee on National Defense, Senator Imee Marcos asked Sara about previous pronouncements of her father that he is “afraid” of his daughter.
“May I ask why the President, your father, repeatedly says that he’s afraid of you?” Marcos asked.
The presidential daughter said that “is something that I think is just in his mind because I have always supported him.”
She, however, admitted that initially she was not subscribing to the idea of her father running for presidency.
“I have always supported his whatever decision that he has in his personal, and well in his career decisions and in his politics… and admittedly initially I did not support his intention to run for president but belatedly I did,” Sara said.
“I told him that the only way that I can help you as President of the Philippines is make sure that Davao City continues on to become a progressive city in Mindanao,” she said.
“I just feel like a beauty queen not a soldier,” she added in jest which elicited laughter in the room.
Once the committee approves the recommendation of the ad interim appointments of Sara and the other AFP officers, it would be transmitted for approval at the plenary.