As President Benigno S. Aquino III enters the second year of his six-year term, there is good reason to hope that his administration has regained its bearings and is now ready to pursue its “Daang Matuwid” with more vigor and determination.
Aquino’s first year in office was found wanting by various sectors, including those who helped him win the presidency. Despite his stint as a senator, Aquino stepped into the presidency with no administrative experience, but his supporters and the voters were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and relied solely on his obvious honesty and sincerity, two values he had learned from his distinguished parents — the martyred Senator Ninoy Aquino and the beloved President Cory Aquino.
After nine years under a leader whose honesty, sincerity and integrity were under question throughout her tenure, the relative innocence of the younger Aquino was a welcome respite from what has been described as a “plunderous and despotic regime.”
But the country’s emergence from a nine-year nightmare also raised high hopes and expectations, one that the relatively inexperienced and politically immature leader seemed incapable of delivering to the people. His political immaturity showed immediately as soon as he settled in Malacanang, engaging in ill-advised antics – whether innocently or by design — such as stopping his presidential convoy to eat at his favorite fast food joint, strolling down a New York avenue to buy hotdogs for him and his party from a hotdog stand, flirting around with different girls in public places and then castigating the media for focusing on his private life, buying and actually driving on a racetrack a P4.5-million Porsche, and being late for nearly all appointments in his first weeks in office, among others.
Even his first State-of-the Nation Address (SONA), while delivered with eloquence, was designed to gain “pogi” points, and not to explain to the people what he intended to do to steer the ship of the state back to its proper course. Instead, he spent nearly the entire speech threatening to prosecute Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and the officials of the previous administration.
Indeed, his first year in office was spent exposing the various anomalies in the past administration — a task Sen. Ping Lacson could have easily done for him had the latter not gone into hiding– and blaming the past leaders for his many shortcomings. While the people understood his whining, they were not ready to accept his apparent lack of direction. With every passing month, Aquino’s approval ratings went down, and understandably so.
His administration was so entrapped by paranoia that it suspended or stopped virtually all government contracts, resulting in an economy suspended in animation, ill will and distrust among foreign investors, and a stagnant domestic employment picture.
His administration was so engrossed in showing it was different from its profligate predecessor, and went to the extreme of under-spending that drastically reduced the erstwhile huge budget deficit, but which also slowed down economic growth and government activities.
The people, whose expectations he had raised, were disappointed that nothing seems to have changed and that beyond the rhetoric, there was nothing much to look forward to. The ‘daang matuwid” seemed dark and crooked, and the state’s ship seemed to have lost its bearing again.
Aquino and his new set of officers exposed various Arroyo anomalies, throughout the year, but his wily predecessor remained uncharged for most part of the year. It was only after Arroyo prematurely tried to grab the offensive by criticizing his alleged failure that Aquino finally decided to nail down Arroyo. And it was not coincidental that the four plunder charges against Arroyo, the revival of the “Hello Garci” scandal, and the filing of hundreds of graft and tax cases against past government officials came within a few weeks of his second SONA speech.
He had to update the nation about his vow to bring to justice those who plundered the nation’s economy in the previous administration, and he had to show the people that the vow was not just another campaign promise.
It would have been easy to look at this new offensive against corruption as another brush fire that would self-extinguish just as soon, except for the fact that his second SONA last Monday seemed more mature and more promising than the first one. Aquino showed he was serious about his drive against corruption by announcing during the speech the appointment as Ombudsman of retired Supreme Court Justice Conchita Carpio-Morales, known for his no-nonsense opinions in the High Court against Arroyo’s policies and practices.
More importantly, Aquino was able to explain the need to weed the country out of the culture of corruption, one he called the “utak wang-wang” or “culture of entitlement” of our leaders and many of our bureaucrats.
In Monday’s SONA, Aquino cited the usual accomplishments and plans, but it was his promise of removing the “wang-wang mentality” or the “culture of entitlement” that struck a chord with the people and his wandering supporters. He was no longer just focusing on Arroyo and his corrupt officials, but was looking at the greater picture – the overall moral degeneration of the bureaucracy and the population. He was promising “to level the playing field; to stop the abuse of authority; and to ensure that the benefits of growth are available to the greatest number.”
With these clear-cut objectives, Aquino revived the hopes of a people long abused by the rich and powerful, long victimized by the corrupt and the abusive, and long neglected by dirty and selfish politicians. Suddenly, the people are willing to give him another chance to prove he was worth their votes.
New promises bring new hopes and higher expectations. Will they bring the country back to the right path, or will they bury the people deeper into the quagmire of poverty and despair? That, we have to see.