Why fix something that ain't broke

Camarines Sur Gov. Luis Raymund Villafuerte has lauded President Aquino for putting a premium on what the latter described as “inclusive growth” in his second State of the Nation Address (SONA) last Monday.

For the young governor, the President struck the right chord in his SONA with his “vigorous push” for, among others, the tourism and agriculture sectors.

It is easy to know where Villafuerte is coming from as CamSur has, under his stewardship, pulled off amazing feats not only as the country’s No. 1 province with the highest palay production growth last year but also it’s the leading tourist draw owing to its must-see CamSur Watersports Complex (CWC) and Caramoan Islands.

Credit the governor and the Provincial Capitol with marketing genius in the side-by-side aggressive marketing of CWC and Caramoan Islands as a package attraction for foreign and domestic tourists alike, a strategy that has enabled CamSur to boast the highest volume of tourist arrivals at 1.88 in 2010, overtaking perennial favorites like Boracay, Cebu and Metro Manila.

This August, CWC will play host anew to the third staging of the Cobra Ironman 70.3, the annual competition that will bring in over a thousand professional and amateur triathletes from 28 countries and is an official qualifier to the two Ironman Championships later this year in Kona, Hawaii and Las Vegas, Nevada. The Caramoan Islands, in turn, has been the site of five international editions of the top-rating global reality TV show “Survivor.”

For Villafuerte’s allies, the so-called graft charges that House Bill no. 4278 backers have been lobbing at the governor are rubbish as these are but nuisance suits reeking of political harassment or vendetta. Only one person—former Sanggunian member Carlo Batalla—had filed nine complaints over the 2007-2010 period, of which seven have been dismissed thus far by the Office of the Ombudsman for lack of merit.

Just recently, Batalla filed yet another complaint against Villafuerte, this time on alleged “ghost” fuel deliveries, but the governor was quick to describe him as an “extortionist,” pointing out in a media report last week that Batalla had filed his latest case just months after he had rejected Batalla’s offer to drop the charges before the Office of the Ombudsman in exchange for cash.

Besides, Batalla himself is facing 18 counts of usurpation of authority as Acting Ombudsman Orlando Casimiro recently ordered the filing of such charges before the Sandiganbayan for violation of the Revised Penal Code.

Suspicions are rife that proponents of HB 4728 are possibly behind Batalla’s latest trumped-up graft complaint as the latter suddenly resurfaced to file another nuisance case against the governor at the height of this split-CamSur controversy.

The governor’s province mates, among them top elective officials and business executives, are getting increasingly restive over what they regard as the House of Representatives’ aberrantly sneak approval in just nine days—sans full committee and plenary deliberations—of a bill that will torpedo these two SONA priorities of the President in wanting to dismember CamSur into two provinces.

Principally authored by Deputy Speaker Arnulfo Fuentebella of the province’s 4th district, HB 4728 seeks to carve a new province—to be named Nueva Camarines—from Iriga City and the 4th and 5th district municipalities of Baso, Balatan, Bato, Bula, Caramoan, Garchitorena, Goa, Lagonoy, Nabua, Presentacion, Sagnay, San Jose, Siruma, Tigaon and Tinambac.

Fuentebella’s camp argue that CamSur is one big hype, with the provincial government so mired in bad governance and graft that the only way the 4th and 5th district could achieve true progress is to emancipate Iriga and the 15 towns from the province and put them together under the bill-proposed Nueva Camarines.

But the other camp has shot this down as rubbish, pointing to nearly a dozen positive indicators as solid proof that CamSur is indeed Bicol’s promising economic powerhouse.

For instance, CamSur has been cited as No. 6 Most Improved Province by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) no less, in its Philippine Human Development Report 2008/2009 with the Human Development Network and the New Zealand Agency for International Development or NZAID.

The same UNDP report bared that CamSur now has the 3rd highest life expectancy in the country at 73 years (after La Union and Bulacan) and largest gains in life expectancy between 1980 and 2006.

Who was behind P-Noy’s wang-wang SONA?

If the first state of the nation address (SONA) of President Benigno Aquino III reverberated because of his vow to stop abuses in government as symbolized by the indiscriminate use by politicians of wang-wangs (police sirens), the President’s second SONA expanded on the wang-wang concept to also include private sector shenanigans.

Sources from the Palace say that two months ago in late May, the Office of Political Affairs (OPA) headed by Presidential Adviser Ronald Llamas made a closed-door presentation to P-Noy on what OPA dubbed as the Wang-Wang Framework.

As seen from the President’s second SONA, P-Noy adopted the Wang Wang Framework as his government’s policy when he said that the wang-wang mentality still exists, including among the 1.7 million self-employed and professional taxpayers such as lawyers, doctors and businessmen, who paid only a total of P9.8 billion in 2010 or an average of P5,783.

According to Palace sources, the Wang Wang Framework as presented to P-Noy builds on the President’s announcement last year that he will put a stop to the use of wang-wang by government officials and the many other abuses symbolized by the wang-wang that people feel everyday and cause them to mistrust or even hate the government.

These symbols of impunity and abuses should be the changes P-Noy should show he is capable of delivering to augment his anti-corruption mantra, according to OPA, which cited as examples, among others, the need to once and for all stop the operation of colorum buses on EDSA to solve the traffic mess, rid legitimate passenger vehicle operators and drivers of unfair competition and to plug a source of government revenue leakage.

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