By Manolo B. Jara
The Gulf Today
MANILA: In what appeared to be the final parting of ways with a “family friend,” President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino on Monday said Vice President Jejomar Binay was free to leave as member of the cabinet if he was not happy with the way the government was being run.“If he thinks our decisions are wrong, he is free not to join us,” Aquino said, referring to Vice President Jejomar Binay who serves in the cabinet as the head of the government’s low-cost housing programme as well as the presidential adviser on concerns of the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs).
Aquino was reacting to recent criticisms from Binay who deplored, among others, the government’s “embarrassingly short performance” particularly on crucial issues like mass transport, the impending power crisis in 2015 and deteriorating peace and order.
Aquino was interviewed by journalists covered live on government radio and TV, who accompanied him to the inauguration of the expanded facility of a popular softdrink plant in Laguna province in Southern Luzon on Monday.
He said: “If he (Binay) thinks our actions are not enough, he should advise us. That is not by choice but an obligation for he is a cabinet official.”
“If he has criticisms for these to be constructive,” Aquino added, “he has to offer solutions. But I have not heard him offer solutions in our past cabinet meetings.”
Earlier, Aquino’s allies in the ruling Liberal Party demanded Binay’s resignation from the cabinet due to his attack on government policies and programmes.
This was the first time that Aquino has made a public statement in reaction to the criticisms of Binay who admitted he was close to the Aquino family, adding it was the late global democracy icon president Corazon “Tita (Auntie) Cory” Aquino who gave him his first break in politics.
Binay is to run in the 2016 election as the standard bearer of the United Nationalist Alliance (UNA) he founded along with former president and now Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada and former Senate president Juan Ponce Enrile.
Enrile, the martial law administrator as the defence minister of the the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was one of three senior senators indicted for plunder before a special court called the Sandiganbayan for their alleged involvement in the misuse of the huge “pork barrel” allocations granted to lawmakers.
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