P-Noy’s angling to prolong his tenure is turning back the tide of reforms. Politicos read it as a signal to work for the lifting of their own constitutional term limits. They’re junking the many anti-political dynasty bills in Congress.
P-Noy’s aiming to clip the Supreme Court’s powers is retrogress too. He would overturn by political force, not legal depth, the SC’s 13-0 illegalization of his presidential pork barrel, the DAP. Lawmakers see in it a chance to restore their congressional pork, the PDAF. To be left untouched are the pork slabs of their kinsmen – provincial governors and board members, and city mayors and councilors.
End result: the political elite will continue to rob the people of their taxes. No development projects will be implemented by national and local agencies. Filipinos will stay poor, hungry, ignorant, and homeless. For lack of domestic opportunities, the few skillful will join the 11 million overseas workers or the seven million emigrants. Political dynasts will continue to cheat into elective office.
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“The President still has trust and confidence in So-and-So.” That has got to be the silliest yet most repeated line of Malacañang spokesmen about any bungling presidential appointee. “Silliest,” for what it really means: that the only thing the bungler has going for him is not wisdom or heart or skill, but The Chief’s misplaced affection.
The Press Secretary had uttered those empty words about National Food Authority head Orlan Calayag. It was in reaction to my exposé of Calayag as unfit to be food security chief. With no training or experience in food logistics, he was but a gofer of his political patron, Agriculture Sec. Proceso Alcala. His biggest previous job was to head in Alcala’s Quezon province an NGO by the self-promoting name, PROCESO. After which, he migrated to the US, doing odd jobs befitting his inaptitude. Guaranteed the NFA headship, he returned to Manila in Jan. 2013 a US citizen. This made him all the more unqualified because the post by law requires a natural-born Filipino. Yet Alacala had convinced the President and Executive Secretary to appoint him. Calayag submitted his credentials, for vetting by the Governance Commission on GOCCs, only in July 2013, six months after he took over. (More details in Gotcha, 23 Oct. 2013.)
To all that the Press Sec retorted that the Governance Commission had found Calayag capable. So “the President has full trust and confidence blah-blah-blah.”
Actually it meant that the Commission was sleeping on the job. For, the law that created it requires that it vet at least three candidates for each position, but clearly had not done so in Calayag’s case. It showed too that a cabal around the President was fooling him about appointees. Later Calayag with Alcala would cause spikes in rice prices in 2013 and 2014. Too, they would be charged with P2.4-billion overprice of imported rice, and rigging the P1.08-billion cargo handling for another batch of imports.
Fortunately for P-Noy, he caught himself in the nick of time and put in a new man in lieu of Alcala as NFA chairman. This forced Calayag to resign, although Alcala forthwith took him into the agriculture department as assistant secretary.
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So there goes the Press Chief again, refraining “presidential trust and confidence” in Philippine National Police chief Alan Purisima. This is in the midst of a crime surge, including daily hired assassinations, the latest victim of which was a police major; and weekly kidnappings for ransom, gang rapes, and daylight robberies.
How presidential trust can remain in Purisima is a mystery, considering that:
• More and more business groups are securing themselves because the police simply cannot be relied on. Managers of nearly 200 hotels, bistros, banks, souvenir shops, travel agencies, and moneychangers in Manila’s Ermita-Malate tourist district have equipped themselves with radio communications. This is to come to each other’s help, because no one answers emergency calls to the two nearby police stations, much more dispatch patrol cars.
• Last week kidnappers killed a Chinese Filipino businessman while ransom negotiations were ongoing. The organization of victims, Movement for Restoration of Peace and Order, reports 50 abductees in 33 incidents in Jan.-Aug. 2014. In 2013, Purisima’s first full year in office, there were 59 victims in 46 kidnappings. Of the two years’ victims, only nine were rescued. Four had escaped with no police help; the rest paid to be freed. Purisima’s Anti-Kidnapping Group, where officers stay only a few months before promotion, has a dismal crime-solution rate – which emboldens more kidnappings.
• The Joint Foreign Chambers is so anxious about the crime wave dampening investors that it had to size up Purisima in a forum.
To all those the Press Sec chatters motherhood lines, like the police being there to protect citizens, so are studying the statistics, and there’s no need for foreigners to worry.
Meanwhile, to look busy, Purisima is cracking down on, of all people, licensed firearms owners. He centralized all license renewals at Camp Crame GHQ, in order to implement a crooked contract for his pals to deliver the licenses to gun owners’ homes. When the courts stopped the contract, Purisima persisted with his centralized renewals, creating a huge backlog. He then announced a yearlong extension of all 670,000 licenses expiring in the next 12 months, on the pretext of needing to inform licensees about a new gun law. Actually, his Firearms and Explosives Division cannot meet the centralization’s required processing rate five licenses per minute. That’s from gun safety seminar to ballistics test firing, neuropsychiatric emanining to photographing and fingerprinting.
Purisima also is busy overseeing the erection of a new PNP Chief’s Mansion inside Camp Crame, the stupendous P25-million cost of which he claimed was donated by unknown friends.
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