When I visited my brother Bob who is living in the US, he and his wife invited me out to dinner. At the end of the meal Bob pointed at the restaurant's rear area and said: “The washroom is over there.” Without a word, I took a folded piece of paper out of my pocket and handed it to him. On it I had written: Bob is going to tell me where the washroom is after the meal.
This was no mind-reading stunt. Bob tells me the same thing after every meal, apparently fearing I lack the mental capacity to remember to wash my hands after a meal, thereby sullying his car, furniture, etc. My point was to show how predictable he had become.
Predictability can be comical among friends and family members. But when it is exhibited among world leaders, it becomes pathetic.
From the moment Benigno S. Aquino III assumed the office of the Presidency, if there is one thing he has been consistent about, it is attributing any of the nation’s deficiencies to his predecessor, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. This he does in everything from his yearly State of the Nation Addresses to press statements.
Personally, I do not care one way or another about GMA. Aside from the time she visited the call center where I worked to showcase how she (and not Mar Roxas) attracted BPO investments, none of her accomplishments (or alleged crimes) stand out in my memory. But whatever failures she must have had as a President, it is simply in poor form for Aquino to continually refer to them like clockwork. Anyone with a modicum of propriety - indeed, of maturity - would know that if they see a problem, even one caused by particular individuals, they should devote their energies to fixing the problem, while silently calling the person aside to get their side and, if necessary, mete out the proper action. The identity of the perpetrator is not germane to the issue. In Noynoy’s case, he is far from silent as to who he thinks is responsible.
My question is simple: Why does he have to do this at all?
Is he trying to elicit sympathy? 'Look at this unholy mess I have to clean up. It’s a massive undertaking. You should be satisfied with any improvements I make.’
If so, then all I see is an effort at prepparing his audience for the inevitable failure of his efforts. (I am reminded of how I would explain my poor grades with the plea: Everybody else got a low grade. But I was in high-school, for heaven's sake.)
It wouldn’t be so bad if Aquino actually did better than Arroyo. Yet whenever citizens’ complaints reach critical proportions, Aquino first blames GMA, then proceeds to screw things up even further. The worst display of this is the Metro Rail Transit issue. After an MRT train jumped the rails and crashed through a concrete barrier in August of 2014, public outrage prompted an investigation of the rail system. Numerous defects were discovered, like cracked rails, outmoded signal and electrical systems frequently breaking down, not to mention escalators and ticket machines that were no longer functioning. The Palace was quick to criticize the GMA administration for this, but the plain truth is that the MRT functioned effectively with only minor interruptions during Arroyo’s term and even the ones before that. The rot began only after the Aquino administration had the Department of Transportation and Communications (headed by the Acting President of the Liberal Party Emilio Abaya) remove in 2010 the regular maintenance provider assigned by the private owners to replace it with a company only two months old with no rail experience and grossly undercapitalized – which happened to be run by a campaign manager for the Liberal Party. Since then, no major repairs had been made, and no spares had been purchased. The private owners were even barred from inspecting critical systems. Even with these revelations, Aquino continued to bluster, saying it was GMA and the private owners of the MRT to blame.
Recently, Aquino again laid the onus of the daily Metro Manila gridlock on Arroyo’s supposed neglect of the MRT. Yet, this still begs the question: What steps did Aquino take to ease traffic when he assumed office? It’s not like the traffic suddenly materialized with the breakdown of the MRT. It has been a chronic problem for generations. Oh, but I signed 20 Public Private Partnership road projects, Aquino crows. So why is traffic still bad? Because of those 20 PPPs, most have not even been put up for bidding, and those that have are bogged down from red tape like right-of-way issues. The NLEX-SLEX Connector Road was supposed to shorten travel time between Buendia and Balintawak to 20 minutes. The project timeline reads like a textbook case of bureaucracy. Ready to go since 2012, one red tape roadblock after another was thrown up, and after all that had been hurdled Aquino, in his function as NEDA Chairman, signed it February of 2015 only after Senate President Franklin Drilon complained how his trip to Baguio had taken 11 hours, thereby proving that all it needed was the moribund Aquino's signature. Worse, because of the delay, the project has to be redesigned, entailing not only additional expense but another slew of bureaucratic foot-dragging by the DOTC's Toll Regulatory Board sitting on approvals. This same leaden pace also plagues other projects like the SCTEX, NAIAX and CALAX. On the whole, out of 20 PPP infrastructure projects signed by Aquino, after five years only one, the Muntinlupa-Cavite Expressway, has been completed.
But the cherry on top of this serving of blame passing came during the recent conference of APEC finance ministers in Cebu. When Aquino stood before this crowd of highly-educated, well-informed international experts, what do you think he did? Three guesses, and two of them don’t count. He blamed Gloria Macapagal Arroyo:
Every day, it seemed, we uncovered issues that had festered during my predecessor's term. At that point, many of us could not help but long for the weekend, if only for a temporary respite from the problems bequeathed to us.
As to what those festering issues were, he enumerated them by way of patting himself on the back:
We relentlessly pursued all those who had committed wrongdoing, regardless of their wealth or influence; we revamped our budgeting system and exercised fiscal prudence, making sure that taxpayer money is spent prudently, conscientiously, and judiciously on projects and programs that truly benefit our people; we cut red tape and made it easier for investors to bet on the Filipino people.
This must have been salt in the wounds of a citizenry who has yet to witness the prosecution of a party ally; who are staggering under deficient infrastructure and social services by a government faulted with underspending by its own Department of Budget and Management; who are still wondering what happened to the other 19 PPP projects, and from red tape that has the World Bank placing the Philippines in rank 161 out of 181 countries surveyed in the category of Ease of Doing Business.
While the citizenry must have rankled, I shudder to think what those informed ministers felt. Was there a collective mental facepalm? Did they ask: How stupid does this guy think we are? Did they also write predictions on slips of paper? Did they take bets in the washroom that Aquino would blame his predecessor? Who needs Polish jokes and blonde jokes when our President is the laughingstock of the international community? Did he think he could bamboozle them as he had his less-critical local audience?
With election season approaching, we must ask ourselves: Do we want six more years of this brand of Daang Matuwid.
