He may be a bit slow, but sometimes he does get it. Of course, there’s really no guarantee that President Noynoy Aquino has truly turned his back on plans to seek a prohibited second term, so it’s best to be prepared for a sudden reversal.
Yesterday, after months of wishy-washiness, Aquino declared that he was no longer seeking to stay in office after he steps down in 2016. And, like he used to do before he started publicly toying with the idea of a term extension prohibited by the 1987 Constitution, he even started talking about the qualities that voters should look for in his successor who was not necessarily himself.
“I don’t think that’s a right solution,” he told an open forum with leaders of the semiconductor and electronics industry, when asked about his plans to seek a second term. “We all have a time card in this world.”
Previously, Aquino was supposedly still “digesting” survey results that showed majority of the people did not want him to seek a second term. He had vowed to consult his “bosses,” his quaint, faux-populist term for the people, before deciding if he would inflict himself on them for longer than the six years that he was contracted to serve as President.
I’ve always believed that Aquino’s declaration of his availability for a second term was merely an ill-concealed bid to delay his inevitable descent into political irrelevance as a lame duck. But it still could have gone the other way, had the calls for a fresh term for “the best President we ever had,” as those nobodies who started a thankfully dissipated campaign for six more years of Aquino described him, caught on.
There really must be something in the air by the polluted Pasig River that makes Presidents—with the notable exception of Cory Aquino, the current Chief Executive’s late mother and the instigator of the one-term limit—dream of staying longer than the law says they should. Since Ferdinand Marcos, only Cory and Joseph Estrada (who never even completed his term) did not seek to go around the ban.
And the current Aquino, while he may have shown some uncharacteristic “sticktoitiveness” when it comes to pursuing his petty political vendettas against people he considered his sworn enemies, never appeared to be the kind of politician who will work hard to lift the ban. At this point, as he said, he simply wants to punch his card in 2016 and get back to doing what he was doing before he became the most powerful man in the land, like collecting cars, guns and girlfriends.
Which is not to say, of course, that Aquino won’t change his mind about running again between now and then. There is certainly no lack of people who will keep whispering in Aquino’s ear that no one can really “continue the reforms” he supposedly started except him—people who never had it so good before and who, in all likelihood, never will again under a less gullible and lackadaisical President.
For the moment, at least, I guess we should be thankful that Aquino has decided to simply follow what the Constitution unequivocally states. After all, if an employee can’t wait to punch his time card and go, most bosses know that person can’t be the best worker they ever had.
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It must be fun to work on the national budget and make errors that cost billions of pesos. What’s several hundred or even just a few billions, after all, among such good friends as Malacañang and Congress?
This week, the House of Representatives intends to pass on third and final reading the P2.606-trillion national budget for 2015, which has been widely viewed as the pre-election budget of the Aquino administration. And, like clockwork, Congress has been accused of giving the Executive a blank check in the form of “errata” which were not approved by lawmakers but which ballooned the budget by billions of pesos, to be used to buy the vote one year before the elections to pick the replacement of President Noynoy Aquino.
The left-leaning “progressive bloc” in Congress has accused the Aquino government, through its Department of Budget and Management, of attempting to illegally insert nearly P500 billion in undiscussed and unapproved appropriations in the proposed General Appropriations Act under the guise of proofreading errata. The bulk of this amount, or P423 billion, will supposedly be channeled to the Department of Interior and Local Government of Secretary Mar Roxas, the putative presidential candidate of the ruling Liberal Party and widely rumored to be Aquino’s own choice for his successor.
The House committee on appropriations, led by its chairman Rep. Isidro Ungab, denied the charge, saying that “only” P4.7 billion in additional funding was tacked on after the submission this week of the 269-page errata. “The only DILG amendment in the budget is the itemization of [an item] previously classified as various projects,” Ungab said.
If neither Malacañang nor Congress seems interested in finding out where the billions lost to Aquino’s Disbursement Acceleration Program went, why should they be bothered by missing budgetary items, after all? As that governor who made headlines last week after being left by his wife for keeping a mistress said: “Tao lang po.”
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