Experience and action

EDITORIAL

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10/23/2009

The vote next year would be pivotal for the country’s future which for almost nine years has been wallowed in uncertainty.

For that period, the Philippines had Gloria Arroyo, who never received a genuine mandate from Filipinos, putting the whole country’s progress in suspended animation socially and economically.

As Susan Roces, widow of opposition standard bearer Fernando Poe Jr. in the 2004 presidential elections, has said, Gloria stole the presidency not once but twice.

In 2001, Gloria, the civil socialites, Church bishops, and scheming generals launched a plot that ousted Joseph Estrada who was the uncontested winner of the presidency in the 1998 elections. No elections, no constitutional process and Gloria, elected vice president, took over Malacañang.

The Supreme Court, which was then headed by Chief Justice Hilario Davide, now the unconfirmed United Nations ambassador, upheld Gloria’s presidency as constitutional citing very flimsy reasons based on diary entries of Sen. Edgardo Angara, which diary not even written by him, and was not even authenticated.

Again in 2004, Gloria with her notorious sidekick Garci, or former Commission on Elections (Comelec) Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano, organized a systematic and massive cheating of the vote for the presidency that gave Gloria over a 1 million fraudulent vote advantage in the final count.

Nearly for the entire period that she was in power, more Filipinos either do not trust or are dissatisfied with Gloria or her performance. Thus, Malacañang’s canned response whenever surveys are released of the presidency is that the presidency is not a popularity contest, or that her focus is on the economy and not on poll results.

The next president would have to be everything that Gloria is not for the country to reverse its present course to oblivion. Despite the test of time, ironically, only few among the candidates are proving themselves to possess the qualities that people look up to as a leader.

The one that would take the helm of government should have first hand experience in running it since the new president is not afforded the time to learn the ropes, so to speak, with the multifarious problems besetting the country. The new leader needs to hit the ground running.

Remove the trappings, and the team of Estrada and Makati Mayor Jejomar Binay stands out as the most capable tandem, with Estrada having been a San Juan mayor, the nation’s senator, vice president and president with an unfinished term while Binay has been elected mayor several times in Makati, the country’s most progressive city where the financial center lies.

Experience is needed at this time to reverse the free-fall dive of the Philippines’ stature in the world of nations.

In the incapable hands of Gloria, the country has become one of the most violent in the world, being known as among the most dangerous places for both activists and journalists.

It also was tagged as being among the most corrupt countries in the world because of the almost clockwork regularity of cases of graft involving the highest officials of the land, including Gloria, Big Mike and their cabal.

Most mistake Erap’s desire to reclaim the presidency as an effort to get back at those who tormented him in the past. While there is reason to vindicate his name as a result of the trumped up charges thrown against him to keep him in detention for about six years, the introspection as a result of those long years being unjustly behind bars only makes Erap’s preeminent goal, as he said so himself, to finish what he had set out to do during his shortened presidency to push the Filipino masses out of their impoverished state.

Estrada knows only too well that by elevating the economic level of most Filipinos can authentic economic development happen and not the advancement that Gloria proclaims everytime which nobody seems to feel except those within her favored circle.

Binay had put that concept into motion in Makati, making its residents among the most contented Filipinos, being the beneficiaries of several social programs of the local government.

Erap and Binay boil down to experience and action combined.

That’s the team that should count.

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