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Wednesday last week I had this rare privilege of
lunching with the stalwarts of the local journalism
profession, especially the respected professionals of
the print medium who have endured (and visibly aged) in
the past two or three decades and are now on top of
their respective heaps—including Isagani Yambot of the
Philippine Daily Inquirer and Crispulo Icban Jr. of the
Manila Bulletin, to name only two, who sat next to me at
the State Dining Hall in Malacañang.
The
occasion was indeed rare, being an eyeball-to-eyeball
encounter with, and billed in Press Secretary Ignacio
Bunye’s faxed invitation as an “interactive” lunch, with
President Arroyo and several members of the Cabinet.
The
President looked regal and somehow formidable even in
her diminutiveness as she walked into the hall, head
high and totally at ease. As she welcomed each of the
guests with a handshake and a gracious smile around the
long, rectangular table, I couldn’t help but detect a
hint of forlornness in her limpid eyes.
The
multifarious burdens of state plus the recuperative
condition of her husband, Mike, must somehow be taking
their toll on her, I told myself. But what man can
really divine what’s on any woman’s mind? “Is a
puzzlement,” as the King in Anna and the King of Siam
would put it.
In that
luncheon, the President was flanked by Executive
Secretary Eduardo Ermita, Health Secretary Francisco
Duque IV, Education Secretary Jesli Lapus, Trade and
Industry Secretary Peter Favila and Energy Secretary
Raphael Lotilla.
Finance
Secretary Gary Teves was conspicuously absent. This was
the very day she announced that the problematic
Commissioner Jose Mario Buñag of the Bureau of Internal
Revenue was definitely out of the picture in her
administration’s bid to see through the fiscal reforms
that her administration had set out to do.
President Arroyo told her guests in a resolute tone and
unequivocal words that history would remember the last
three years of her presidency as the “legacy phase” of
her incumbency.
She said
there would be no sidetracking her in her efforts to
reduce poverty through programs creating more livelihood
and job opportunities. This would be possible, she said,
only in an economy made robust by several factors,
including the achievement of fiscal discipline on the
part of the bureaucracy, elimination of graft and
corruption and red tape and, in general, creating a more
affable climate for foreign investments and local
entrepreneurship.
Her
administration, she pointed out, was already two years
ahead of schedule in its bid to operate under a balanced
budget (to be proposed for 2008), which would, in turn,
strengthen the government’s spending power for essential
services in health, education and infrastructure.
Read out
of context, such a menu of intentions would seem like a
mere rehash of the platitudes or pie-in-the-sky promises
that the media have grown accustomed to getting from the
press-release factory of Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye.
But
GMA’s audience that day, I believe, had carefully
observed her tone of voice, facial expression, choice of
words—in short, her body English—and went away satisfied
that she really means business this time.
It
helped that the program presentation by Jesli Lapus
proposed only realistic—or very “doable” goals—to start
raising the quality of teaching in our deteriorating
public-school system. Health Secretary Duque and Trade
Secretary Favila also gave presentations that neatly got
the President’s drift.
The one
message that GMA wanted to convey to the media on that
day was this: Hey, I will do all of these things with
all the political will I can muster. But I need your
(media’s) help to succeed. Please help me spread the
word so that the people can help in the common endeavor
to make this a country we can all be proud of.
But of
course, many will continue to doubt that President
Arroyo really means business this time. For my part, I
think she is hell bent on righting many things that are
wrong in this country. As of this writing, for example,
I was told that GMA is all set to fire Customs
Commissioner Napoleon Morales within this week upon her
return from
Bangkok.
Morales
has clung to his post despite broad hints and overt
signs that he no longer enjoys the President’s
confidence. Morales, my source says, will be replaced by
any of two names on a short list with surnames starting
with the letter “C” and “T.”
I’m
convinced that at this juncture of her political career,
the President wants history to judge her tenure kindly.
She wants to leave in her wake enduring reforms in the
system that would jump-start the process of making this
country attain First World country status in about 20
years.
But if
she really wants to endear herself both to the masses
and the business sector within her three-year time
frame, she must muster the political will to overhaul
the power sector, which even now has been heaping untold
hardships on the people. The issue of unconscionably
high power rates and a plan of action to lower them
should be among her top priority concerns from now until
2010.
But to
achieve this, she has to dismantle the Lopez monopoly on
distribution in Luzon and its emergent stranglehold on
the power generation aspect of the industry. This can be
done only through a thorough rewrite of the Epira, the
original draft of which, I heard, was written in toto in
one of the Lopez family’s boardrooms.
Omerta_bdc@yahoo.com |
