SONA Fixations--A Folly of Power

This editorial of The Daily Tribune describes the next State of the Nation Address of President BS Aquino charting along the blame Gloria ploy. However the old trick does not work this time and it only proves the common perception that the Aquino administration has done nothing substantial. Below is the text and cartoon of the said editorial. My comments will follow after the editorial.

  

Sona Fixations

The Editorial:

The contents of Noynoy’s State of the Nation Address (Sona) were previewed by the Palace with reporters before the weekend and it seems the final cut would be a major revision since the usual formula of claiming achievements solely by blaming everything on the past administration and for which Noynoy is being criticized  heavily as he always says it is Gloria’s fault.

Constantly bashing the heads of his enemies won’t work this time and insisting on it would only strengthen perceptions that nothing indeed was achieved in the two years that Noynoy has been in in power.

The Sona is the occasion for Noynoy to persuade Congress to go along with him in the passing of urgent bills and in the past years it seems that Noynoy has a poor batting average on his administration’s priority bills passing in Congress. Thus, his legislative agenda usually ends way off target every year.

Out of the 17 or so bills certified as urgent from last year’s Sona, only the amendments to the Anti-Money Laundering Act (AMLA) hurdled Congress and the most significant bill of transparency, the Freedom of Information (FoI) bill was not even among those that got the Palace seal on the last Sona, belying Noynoy’s claim for transparency.

The FoI bill only recently got a certification from Malacañang but only after revisions on provisions involving disclosure of government data, which were given limits.

Despite that certification, however, allies of Noynoy in the House led by public information committee chairman Eastern Samar Rep. Ben Evardone are sitting on the FoI bill version in the House with the alibi being forwarded about the need to reconcile 15 bills on the same issue.

What is coming out, however, is that allies of Noynoy are reluctant to give their approval to the bill unless a provision on the right to reply is included in it.

Evardone, however, surrendered the possibility that which would come out as the final version of the FoI bill would be much watered down than the original copy. This just proves that Noynoy’s claim to transparency is all hypocritical talk.

It was when he was on a campaign trail that he vowed to ensure the passage of the FoI law, while criticizing the then House of Representatives for not passing the FoI.

Yet when he became president, not only did he not have Congress work on the bill; he even made sure that the bill would be so watered down — enough to make the FoI opaque.

Thus, while Noynoy has to affix his seal to the FoI bill, likely grudgingly, as a result of international pressure and those coming from local rights groups, his allies in the House take care of throwing roadblocks to its passage.
A coalition monitoring the travails of the FoI bill said the House has conducted only two committee hearings on the FoI, which has been filed and refiled since the 12th Congress or in the last 14 years.

The bill will again have a poor chance of getting approval from the House since congressmen are expected to turn their attention to the campaigns for the May 2013 elections after the filing of  their certificates of candidacy was moved forward by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) to this October.

The Reproductive Health bill is another crucial legislation that the administration of Noynoy cannot seem to get its act together. The bill, controversial as it is, did not even get an endorsement from the Palace mainly as a result of pressure from the Catholic Church.

Considering that legislation provides the directions for an administration’s policy roadmap, it would be safe to assume that nothing significant was achieved the past two years except of course for running after Gloria and her minions.

Sadly, however, pure police work won’t count much for governance.

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