Set aside politics, Cabinet members urged

Two of the youngest Cabinet members appealed to their former colleagues in Congress to buckle down to work and stop jockeying to be the anointed one for the 2004 presidential elections.

Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC) chairman Michael Defensor and Agrarian Reform Secretary Hernani Braganza issued the call yesterday while attending the whole-day Cabinet workshop at Malacañang.

Defensor and Braganza, former congressmen of Quezon City and Pangasinan, respectively, specifically directed their appeals to their pro-administration partymates in the Liberal Party (LP) and the ruling Lakas-NUCD.

The two deplored the "jockeying" now taking place in order to become the "anointed" presidential standard-bearer of President Arroyo just a few days after she declared that she was bowing out of the race in 2004.

Defensor is the vice president for the national capital region of the LP which belongs to the pro-administration People Power Coalition (PPC), while Braganza is the deputy secretary general of Lakas where Mrs. Arroyo is the national chairman.

The two young Cabinet officials were formerly members of the so-called "Spice Boys" while they were in the House of Representatives, before they were recruited to join the Arroyo administration after the EDSA II people power revolution in January 2001 that ousted former President Joseph Estrada.

Defensor called up The STAR yesterday to reveal that it was Braganza who raised this appeal in the course of their Palace workshop and quoted the latter as telling their Cabinet colleagues: "The point of the President is precisely asking for a stop to politicking so that we could all buckle down to work."

This was confirmed by Braganza himself when The STAR called him up to verify his statement.

But Braganza made clear that politics was not the subject matter of the workshop, saying he just blurted out the remark as a reaction to discussions of Mrs. Arroyo’s instructions to her Cabinet officials to work double time in the next six to 18 months "without any political considerations" since she herself is not running next year.