Group of ex-government officials to guide voters

MANILA, Philippines - A group of retired senior government officials yesterday said it will come up with guidelines to help voters choose the presidential candidate they will support.

The Former Senior Government Officials (FSGO) said voters must determine if the presidential candidate is likely to abuse power and government resources.

“They should watch out for such personalities or characters. We should be very careful if we do not want a repeat of what had happened, given the style of governance of our past presidents,” said former Civil Service Commission chair Karina David in a forum held yesterday at the Asian Institute of Management in Makati City.

In her presentation, David noted that among the powers of the president, the power to appoint is the most important.

“This is because we are dealing here with the most important resource which is human resource or the human being. This gives (the president) the right to put someone in office or appoint someone,” she said.

“Therefore the power to appoint also becomes the power to control.”

She said voters should also consider a candidate’s platform of governance as well as his or her political party.

She asked presidential candidates to make clear their stand on particular issues and if possible, point out the personalities they will most likely appoint to Cabinet positions.

Possible election failure

FSGO alleged that the administration could be deliberately sabotaging the success of the May elections.

“Deliveries, testing, calibration, validation and training for automated elections are delayed. Ballot printing is also delayed. Fears of logistical failures in providing the right set of customized ballots for each of the 1,630 towns of the country remain unresolved. Calls to prepare for a back-up manual elections are not being taken seriously,” FSGO said in a separate statement.

“Whatever the reasons might be, however the situation might actually unfold, one thing must be made clear: failure in the 2010 elections can only be a deliberate one engineered by the GMA administration that has benefited so much from such events,” it added.

The FSGO said the administration is taking many alarming steps to retain influence beyond President Arroyo’s term.

“It has launched government-funded public relations efforts touting its achievements as if it were itself a contending presidential candidate.