Commentary
The Arroyo presidency: Where’s the beef?

Before we forget People Power 2 and what it was all about, the very first item on the agenda should always be what is the real score of the new presidency. There’s been a new occupant in Malacañang over the last three months and people are beginning to wonder, where’s the leadership the new tenant has promised to deliver? Just asking.

By Edmundo Santuario III

In one of her first policy speeches after assuming the Philippine presidency, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo said that her government would adopt an austerity program. Considering that the public deficit is projected to reach P145 billion (almost US$3 billion) this year, her remark hit the target.

The intention was more than that, however. The message being conveyed was that she would be different from her ousted predecessor, Joseph Estrada, who literally drank his way through a brief tinkering with power capped by profligacy, building mansions for a coterie of mistresses and, as reported, enriching himself even more through cronyism, corruption and links with the underworld. On the side, he managed to sit in a few cabinet meetings, deliver some speeches, execute a number of death convicts and launch an all-out war against Moro rebels and extremists. The costs, in both performances by one of Philippine moviedom’s idols, were scandalous.

Under Arroyo, her wish has become everyone’s command. Education Secretary Raul S. Roco – who is eyeing the presidency, again, in 2004 – led the cabinet pack by letting go of the controversial luxury vehicles bought by his predecessor and vowing to go on provincial sorties with an FX Tamaraw, an air-cooled public conveyance popular among lower-income professionals and students. (This vehicle, incidentally, killed the country’s only pride in the public transport industry – the Sarao jeepney.)

Arroyo herself, during official functions, would wear a simple attire. But she has redone her physical looks prompting one columnist to utter that the president looks younger and in her old colegiala days. Wearing similar outfits, she would receive a foreign ambassador in Malacañang (the presidential office), visits a slum community in Tondo (where she gets booed by Estrada loyalists) and inspects the troops somewhere in Mindanao in southern Philippines.

To avoid being accused of using presidential influence, the president refused to sign the appointment of her daughter as a foreign service officer. The daughter was among three applicants who made it to the new batch of diplomatic officers.

Arroyo’s son, Mickey, is running however for vice-governor of Pampanga, a province north of Manila. Whether this would later on open up charges of creating yet another political dynasty remains to be seen.

Through all her first official functions, Arroyo, who will soon complete her first 100 days as president, has managed to improve her approval rating from 4 to 48, according to the latest Social Weather Station (SWS) survey. That survey, together with the recent Supreme Court decision affirming her presidency, may have boosted her self-confidence. Because now she seems to be more certain of what she says, an attitude which is made distinct by a typical Arroyo grin. Like Corazon Aquino who as president and to this day always reminded her audiences of her late husband, the new president also likes to reminisce life experiences with the late President Diosdado Macapagal as if to suggest that she still lives under the shadow of her father.

She cracks some simple jokes now and then but not effortlessly the way Joseph Estrada would deliver his, down-to-earth, to his audience.

Vision

All these, however, look more like a matter of form than of substance. Those who have followed her presidency from Day One until today, now ask among themselves: But where’s the beef? After nearly three months of watching her move, talk and meet people, all that the keen observer can discern is a picture of a president looking at a distant horizon and not knowing which road to take to get there.

There is no presidential program to speak of, let alone a vision that every technocrat will always say is needed to inspire the country’s deliverance from the plunder, corruption and cronyism that had marked the Estrada presidency. For sure, there are the motherhood statements about, aside from austerity measures, “transparency” in governance, the pursuit of a leadership by consensus, combatting poverty which, she says, remains the country’s main enemy, and so on. And some cynic will always say, he has heard many of these before - even from Estrada himself. There could be some bright ideas there and, assuming that there indeed are, these ain’t articulated well enough especially if one has a presidential spokesperson like Ramon Corona.

Where – and not necessarily what - is her program on land reform? Where is her economic agenda? Where is the alternative government that the Edsa People Power 2 forces were looking forward to?

The answers or specifics, as she would always say during her weekly press conference, are best left to her cabinet secretaries. But the only cabinet member who has so far amplified on what agenda to take is Roco, who has vowed to cleanse the education department of graft and to give all public schoolteachers what is due them timely and justly. Of course, these are mere words and Roco has yet to deliver some tangible results.

In other departments, instead of a program what has set in is chaos of some sort. There are reports that new Agrarian Reform Secretary Hernani Braganza has been creating more enemies than he can handle in his department. Environment Secretary Heherson Alvarez plunged right away into a combative mode – on his first day, he warned of a purge among both officials and rank-and-file employees, thereby creating a chilling effect rather than intensity which every secretary needs at the start of his term. Agriculture Secretary Leonardo Montemayor has committed himself to revitalizing the country’s own food production and to reduce its reliance on food imports. The following day came a report that rice imports would be arriving in the country.

Consensus

The president tried to apply her principle of politics and leadership by consensus in solving the Metro Manila’s garbage crisis. After listening to some stormy session among “waste management managers,” Arroyo put an end to the bickering by leaving it up to each local government to solve its own waste problem. Meantime, the San Mateo sanitary landfill is supposed to be finally closed at the end of this month and no alternative dumpsite has been identified. Some enterprising garbage contractors have found in Manila Bay a natural waste dump. Mountains of garbage are still mess up in every major road and street corner of the metropolis.

There is clarity in Arroyo’s words, however, when it comes to handling the Armed Forces and the police and on the issue of globalization. On this, she has lavished praises on her generals, particularly new Defense Secretary Angelo Reyes whom she calls an “outstanding patriot” and a “man of peace, democracy and justice” and the soldiers for being “role models to the Filipino citizenry.” Promising to pursue the AFP’s modernization program, she ordered pay increases and benefits to all AFP personnel, prompting teachers and government employees groups, who have yet to be treated similarly, to react negatively.

Arroyo who, as a senator authored the resolution that paved the Senate’s ratification of the controversial General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), feels as strongly as ever in globalization, something which she says the Filipinos should accept. She has proposed the adoption of “safety nets,” however, to help cushion globalizations’ adverse effects. That pronouncement will not certainly wash with many Filipinos, including the thousands who have lost their jobs, who have seen the worst under globalizations policies.

Now, it looks like the economy is headed for some rough sailing. The Philippine peso has not improved significantly contrary to expectations that the currency would recover following a change in the presidency. No significant major foreign investments have flowed in, either. The only major investment thus far is a $300 million Philip Morris investment to put up a cigarette factory in Batangas and the only reason is that the Philippines is the only country that has welcomed the cigarette giant after many countries have banned smoking. But this was actually Estrada’s project yet. Economic Planning Secretary Dante Canlas has a grim economic forecast for the year: 3.8 percent as against Arroyo’s projection of more than 4.3 percent.

The rule of thumb is that a crisis should always give birth to a new idea, a new vision. People Power 2 already delivered a major message – the need for a new beginning and a fresh leadership. Arroyo has apparently fallen short of that expectation - and it’s only the beginning.  #