Promises, promises

ON DISTANT SHORE
By Val G. Abelgas

When President Aquino promptly rejected an offer by Energy Secretary Carlos Jericho Petilla to resign over a failed promise to restore power in the areas devastated by super typhoon Yolanda before Christmas, he simply proved he didn’t give a hoot about making and breaking promises. After all, the President has made and broken a lot of promises himself. So why bother over a little broken promise to the typhoon victims?

But the President is missing the point. By promising something he should have known he couldn’t keep, Petilla raised the expectations of the people that later on turned to be another disappointment. In the same manner, by promising the Filipino people the rose garden, so to speak, and then leaving them on the dark after three years, Aquino has merely worsened their frustrations and hopelessness.

Just before “Yolanda” struck, he boasted that there would be “zero casualty” because of the intense preparation done by the government prior to the typhoon. So when a Tacloban official said that the casualty could reach 10,000, Aquino was so mad the poor official had to go. Aquino said the death toll was closer to 2,500 than 10,000, but day after day, the President was proved wrong because there are now around 6,200 deaths and still counting, which is definitely closer to 10,000 than to the 2,500 he was insisting.

Aquino was elected because he promised to curb corruption and thereby eliminate poverty with his “kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap” campaign slogan. And yet, corruption scandals continue to hound his administration. He promised to curb corruption in every level and yet he opted to defend and keep both the congressional and his own pork barrel, which is clearly the biggest source of corruption and political patronage in the country. The Supreme Court had to step in to stop the continued loss of billions of pesos of the people’s money to unscrupulous politicians and businessmen.

Just last Monday, as if he was unaware of repeated reports of rampant corruption in various government agencies — including the Department of Budget and Management that holds office right inside Malacanang, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Agrarian Reform, the Bureau of Customs and the National Food Administration, among others, he boasted that the “last vestiges of corruption” would be eliminated soon.

He promised to eliminate jueteng, another big source of corruption both in the national and local levels, but, by all accounts, the illegal numbers game continue to rake in billions of pesos daily from the poor while politicians and police officials fatten their pockets with protection money and jueteng lords laugh all the way to the bank.

He vowed to curb smuggling but other than create a rigodon of customs commissioners and officials, the country continues to lose trillions of pesos yearly to smugglers.

Every time he spoke to Filipinos abroad, he boasted that the country would attain self-sufficiency in rice and would, in fact, become a rice exporter before his term is over. And yet, we all know now that smugglers continue to lord it over the rice trade and that local farmers have simply given up competing with rice imported from Vietnam and Thailand because of the unfair competition from the smuggled rice. Now, it is almost certain that the Philippines will continue to import rice for years to come.

Aquino promised during the campaign and in his first State-Of-The-Nations Address (SONA) that he would ensure passage of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act in the first three years of his term. It has been three-and-a-half years since and the measure, which would boost transparency and accountability in government transactions, has not even gone beyond the House committee on public information.

If the President is really serious about curbing corruption and ensuring transparency, all he has to do is give the go-signal to Congress by certifying it as priority legislation. But for some reason, Aquino has opted to protect his corrupt allies in Congress by refusing to certify the FOI Bill as urgent.

The President promised to eliminate poverty and now boasts of the 7.8 percent growth in GDP attained in the last quarter powered mostly by the rapidly increasing remittances of overseas Filipinos. But economists say that the report failed to mention that along with the GDP growth is the sensational increase in prices of basic commodities and that while the tycoons continue to increase their wealth (with the net worth of the country’s 40 richest equivalent to the income of 60 million Filipinos), 25 million Filipinos or 27.9 percent of the total population continue to live in poverty.

Undaunted, Aquino again promised growth for all in his fourth SONA in July, but failed to lay out a concrete plan on how he would do this.

Aquino pledged a better world for the people of Mindanao, vowing peace with the Muslim rebels before his term is over and promising to end the debilitating power outages in the region. He boasted that peace is at hand with the signing of the framework agreement with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. But experts doubt if the final peace agreement could be reached before 2016, and that even if an accord with the MILF is reached, it remains doubtful if peace would finally reign over Mindanao because Nur Misuari’s Moro National Liberation Front feels spurned because, it said, the government’s negotiations with the MILF violated provisions of the Tripoli Peace Agreement it signed with Misuari in 1996 and that the MILF was excluded from the ongoing negotiations.

The MNLF threatened to renew hostilities and showed it meant what it said by launching a siege on Zamboanga in October that resulted in many deaths and the evacuation of thousands of families. And by the way, power outages have worsened in many parts of Mindanao and all the administration could think of is employing expensive power barges.

Aquino bowed to erase the culture of impunity that has resulted in hundreds of unsolved extra-judicial killings of local officials, journalists and judges. And yet, in his three years in office, the human rights group Karapatan said it has recorded at least 152 extrajudicial killings and 168 frustrated killings, with 18 enforced disappearances, 358 illegal arrests and detentions “on trumped up charges, tortures and other gross human rights violations.”

International groups and foreign governments, including the US State Department, have repeatedly condemned the Aquino administration for the continued murder of media members, which, according to Reporters Without Borders, has claimed the lives of 27 Filipino journalists since Aquino first assumed power.

The bottom line is that Aquino continues to make promises that raise false hopes on a people already reeling from hopelessness and despair brought about by decades of corrupt and incompetent leadership. He should have gladly accepted Petilla’s resignation to show that promises are important to him and that unlike Petilla, he is bent on keeping them.

(valabelgas@aol.com)