With Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte winning by a landslide over President Aquino’s anointed candidate Mar Roxas, it’s obvious “daang matuwid” has come to a dead end. After all, Aquino has repeatedly said the 2016 presidential election is a referendum on how the people rate his administration’s performance and whether or not they want “daang matuwid” to continue for the next six years.
His so-called “bosses” themselves put a roadblock to “daang matuwid” by ignoring Roxas and turning instead to a tough-talking political outsider for radical change that they had hoped would be achieved by Aquino’s “kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap” mantra.
Aquino had stomped the campaign trail in the last few weeks to push for victory for Roxas and his “daang matuwid,” even claiming in the last week of the campaign that he is the best president the country has ever had in terms of solid performance.
Obviously, less than one-fourth of the voters believed him because only this much percentage voted for his anointed candidate.
While Aquino boasted of the success of his administration in the last week of the campaign, on the same breath Sen. Miriam Defensor Santiago was calling “daang matuwid” the “ultimate frustration” of the Filipino people. Sen. Grace Poe, who refused to say anything negative against Aquino for most of the campaign, said people are disillusioned with the Aquino administration’s “daang matuwid” governance because of its failure to provide decent public services.
Even Roxas had to acknowledge the Aquino administration’s many mistakes towards the end of the campaign when he told the voters during a rally: “I know deciding whom to vote for will not be easy for you. Maybe you have chosen other candidates already. But we also know that the government has its shortcomings and that your complaints are valid.”
Roxas promised to correct the mistakes of Aquino’s “daang matuwid” in an apparent, albeit belated, effort to dissociate himself from his friend Aquino, who has proved to be a baggage instead of an effective endorser for his presidential bid. The former senator from Capiz must have realized by now that he should have campaigned independently of Aquino and presented his own program of government instead of promising to continue the President’s failed “daang matuwid” program.
Aquino’s “daang matuwid” failed on the very first day of his term when he ignored tradition and took his oath before then Associate Justice now Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales, the lone dissenter in a Supreme Court vote that ruled that the two-month ban on presidential appointments did not cover the judiciary. If he followed tradition, he should taken his oath before Chief Justice Renato Corona.
It was clearly a vengeful act against the SC decision that deprived him of the right to appoint the Chief Justice. As it turned out, it was only the first of many clashes Aquino had with the high tribunal, a co-equal branch of government, that reached its crescendo with Corona’s impeachment.
Aquino used every available forum to embarrass Corona, including one where he lambasted the Supreme Court’s decisions right in front of Corona, and revived the issue of the midnight appointment although the tribunal had already ruled on it.
Why the hatred for Corona and the Supreme Court? Aquino apparently could not forgive the justices for stopping his first two executive orders that Law Dean Fr. Ranhillo Aquino described as “negative in tenor and vengeful in intent” – the one recalling the appointment of thousands of employees he labeled as midnight appointees and the other creating a Truth Commission that would have enabled his administration to conduct a witch hunt of the officials of the previous administration.
But there was an even more important decision that eventually led to Aquino’s displeasure over the Supreme Court and to Corona’s impeachment. In a unanimous resolution, the SC had ordered the distribution of the 4,915.75-hectare Hacienda Luisita, which is owned by the Aquino-Cojuangco clan, to the original 6,296 farmer-beneficiaries. Three weeks after that landmark decision, Corona’s impeachment began.
By then, his vengeful acts against Corona and his alleged use of pork barrel funds to make the congressmen and senators follow his orders of impeaching the Chief Justice had drowned out his initial gains in the shallow “wang wang” policy.
Until now, Aquino cites the impeachment of Corona, the imprisonment of former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, and Senators Juan Pone Enrile, Jinggoy Estrada and Bong Revilla on plunder charges as the highlight of his “successful” campaign against corruption. And yet, he cannot explain why he was fast in defending his closest aides in the Cabinet – Transportation Secretary Emilio Abaya, Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala and Budget Secretary Florencio Abad – when these three bulwarks of the Liberal Party were embroiled in corruption scandals.
It became obvious that the “daang matuwid” was only applicable to his opponents while his friends and allies were free to thread the dark, crooked path of corruption without fear of imprisonment. It was a clear case of “selective justice” and Aquino couldn’t care less about such criticisms.
If indeed the “daang matuwid” were a straight path for everybody that would eliminate corruption and remove the stumbling block to poverty, why then was the government plagued with so many corruption scandals during his term, from the lowly “tanim-bala” at the airports, to rice smuggling, to the gigantic pork barrel anomalies involving the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) and the Disbursement Acceleration Program) that were ultimately ruled unconstitutional and illegal by the Supreme Court?
Other events that would forever sully Aquino’s legacy were the Luneta hostage crisis in the first month of his term that exposed to the world his new government’s ineptitude; the tragedies wrought by super typhoon Yolanda and the siege of Zamboanga city by Muslim rebels that showed his administration’s incompetence and lack of compassion; the Mamasapano massacre that resulted in the death of 44 elite policemen and showed that this government was not only inept and indifferent but is also capable of covering up the truth; and the brutal dispersal of farmers asking for relief from hunger in Kidapawan that ended with three farmers dead and 53 injured, which showed the government’s lack of apathy for the poor’s plight.
Aquino had raised the bar high and yet failed to deliver. He had raised the people’s hope too high and let them slam back to the ground with his unfulfilled promises.
And he is surprised that the voters opted for radical change instead of pursuing his failed “daang matuwid”?
(valabelgas@aol.com)