MANILA, Philippines - After officially declaring his intention to run for president next year, Interior Secretary Manuel Roxas II should accept defeat in the 2010 vice presidential race and drop the electoral protest he filed against Vice President Jejomar Binay.
This was according to Binay spokesman for media affairs Joey Salgado, who said that Roxas should now focus on 2016 and withdraw his election case against the Vice President.
“Maybe it’s time for Secretary Roxas to move on since he will surely run in 2016. He should now drop his election protest, admit defeat and focus instead on 2016,” Salgado said.
The Vice President, meanwhile, said his advantage over Roxas was only heightened by the latter’s announcing his presidential bid.
“It has been more than five years since the Roxas camp filed its election protest. Yet until now they have not paid the required filing fee and have been insisting that taxpayers pay for the cost of the forensic test,” Salgado said.
Binay’s counsel Sandra Coronel earlier said they have asked the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET), composed of 15 justices of the Supreme Court (SC), to junk the protest for lack of merit and for being invalid.
The protest remains unresolved and is still at pre-trial stage, she said.
In his protest filed in July 2010, Roxas alleged that election results used for Binay’s proclamation did not reflect actual votes due to what he described as an “anomalously high incidence” of null and misread votes in the certificates of canvass in all precincts nationwide, especially in his bailiwicks Regions 6, 7 and Caraga.
Roxas believes counting the null votes would have made him overtake the final 727,084-vote advantage of Binay.
For Rico Quicho, another Binay spokesman, a presidential endorsement is no guarantee of election victory.
Quicho said President Aquino’s endorsement of Roxas as Liberal Party (LP) standard-bearer was “nothing but expected and actually anti-climactic.”
He said no amount of praise from the President can erase Roxas’ failure in his tasks under the present administration.
“Truth be told, Roxas simply did not get things done to uplift the lives of our people. Worse, he is petty and vindictive,” Quicho said in a statement.
Vindictive
Quicho said Roxas’ vindictiveness was proven in Tacloban, Leyte, a known bailiwick of the relatives of former first lady Imelda Marcos, right after Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) in 2013.
“Lest we forget, Roxas told City Mayor Alfred Romualdez that because of his surname, P-Noy as an Aquino would never help him,” Quicho said.
“Two years from that tragedy, with more than 6,000 dead, 2,000 injured and countless more left without homes, this same man, who is a study in incompetence and lack of sensitivity for the plight of the downtrodden, is being hailed as the yellow hero to succeed to the throne of the mighty Aquino,” he said.
Quicho also said Aquino’s complimenting Roxas for getting things done is “a lie of the highest order.”
He said it was a statement that the President himself “does not seem to take too seriously.”
He cited Roxas’ being kept out of the loop by Aquino in the operation to arrest terrorists in Mamasapano, Maguindanao last Jan. 25. The operation went awry, leaving 44 members of the Special Action Force (SAF) dead at the hands of Muslim rebels.
“If P-Noy truly thought that Mar gets things done, why did he keep Roxas, the interior secretary, out of the loop about the ill-fated police operation in Mamasapano?” Quicho said.
He chided Roxas for initially blaming the police commandos for the “misencounter.”
“To cover up, Roxas in a cheap publicity stunt would later cry in public for two weeks during SAF events, including burials in the Cordilleras. A doer? You be the judge,” Quicho said.
He also laughed off Roxas’s presenting himself as the only candidate capable of carrying on the administration’s daang matuwid (straight path) advocacy.
He likened Aquino’s straight path to a road accessible only to the privileged few who manage to climb their way to the President’s and the LP’s good graces. – With Non Alquitran, Rodel Clapano