Credit-grabbing

Credit-grabbing must be a Liberal Party thing.

Acting Makati mayor Romulo Pena, at his post for only a few weeks, recently took credit for the city’s achievement of 90 percent of its revenue target during the period January to August this year. With four more months remaining, we are nearly sure the city, unlike the revenue agencies of the national government, will vastly exceed its target. 

This is not only flagrant credit-grabbing. It is so obnoxiously untrue, Pena must take the residents of the city for fools. He even put out ads praising his “achievement.”

In addition to dishonestly portraying his role in the city’s efficient revenue performance, UNA spokesman Joey Salgado takes the acting mayor to task for claiming “authorship of the yellow card and benefits for senior citizens.” Those programs were put in place early in the term of Vice-President Jejomar Binay, perhaps long before Pena was even qualified as a voter.

During the brief period since he took over from the suspended Junjun Binay, Pena has kept himself busy scouring the files of the city government trying to unearth fodder for scandal. The most he could do from that effort was to unearth a handful of senior citizens receiving benefits from the city even if they did not actually reside there. Makati extends benefits to senior citizens for as long as they are voters in the city.

Pena’s friends at the Senate “subcommittee” seized upon the acting mayor’s claims and tried to build scandal out of thin evidence. The “subcommittee,” after all, is running our of fuel to keep the fire burning even if much of the public has tired of the obviously partisan muckraking.

It does seem the objective of the effort to unseat Junjun Binay and install an LP cadre in his place was to open the document vault and find fuel for the scandal-mongering against the Vice-President. To those who relied on Pena to deliver the goods, the acting mayor must have proven a disappointment.

Lately, the acting mayor has been preoccupied plastering his likeness in every corner of the city in a blatant campaign of self-promotion. He is obviously planning to run for the post he now questionably occupies.

Faux

Each time President Aquino stands up and starts boasting, I cringe, embarrassed for him.

Very often, his claims are misplaced or based entirely on misreading the facts. The evidence did not merit the bombast. The achievement did not support the boast. But he does it anyway, again and again.

This week, speaking before the APEC finance ministers at Cebu, Aquino again failed to rise above himself and talk about things that might truly resonate with the crowd. As in many previous occasions, he went into an exercise in self-promotion. This time, he haughtily held up the largely imagined achievements of his administration, presenting these as models for the rest of the APEC economies to emulate.

I cringed particularly hard this last instance because Aquino was not speaking to an unlettered audience that might be carried away by his glibness. This was an audience of finance ministers, mostly from countries doing far better than we are. Aquino’s speech was an insult to this audience.

The finance ministers are better informed than the ordinary. They are well versed in the strategic problems facing the countries of the Asia-Pacific at this time. They are not entertained by superfluous claims.

They are also well informed of the strategic problems facing the Philippine economy, which Aquino did not mention. Among these are: the hollowing out of our manufacturing and export sectors, the chronic poverty and unemployment levels, the infra gap this administration miserably failed to address and the bureaucratic reform left undone.

Case in point: Aquino claimed before this most informed audience that the Philippines has solved the problem with red tape.

He should have first read the latest World Bank “ease of doing business” report. This year the Philippines fell several notches to rank No. 161 among 181 countries surveyed. How could we have possibly licked the problem with red tape when the numbers show it has become even more difficult to start up a business in our economy?

Aquino found the gall to foist our public-private partnership program as a model the rest of the APEC economies might emulate. In five years of what is supposed to be the centerpiece program of this administration, all this government has to show is a four-kilometer toll road at Daang-hari.

It took the previous administration a year-and-a-half to “close the loop,” linking MRT-3 to LRT-1. After five years, the Aquino administration has yet to build the “common station” that will link the two vital commuter rail lines.

Right now, the DOTC is asking P7.5 billion in “penalty payments” to the winning bidder of the LRT-1 Cavite extension – even if absolutely nothing has commenced with that rather simple project. The penalty payments harvests a storm of public protests over the incompetence with which the PPP has been handled.

This case will likely yield scandal. It turns out the money handed the Cavite provincial government to purchase right-of-way for the rail line was used to purchase property that was nowhere near the LRT-1 alignment.

The connector road linking the SLEX and the NLEX should have been completed by now. For some reason, final approvals were delayed three years for no clear reason. The connector road will do a lot to relieve the infernal traffic situation in the metropolis and yet did not seem to enjoy priority in this administration.

Our PPP program, thus far, has been a horror story.