State of the Nation Address

The true state of the nation

Posted July 29, 2009 00:30:00(Mla Time)

Philippine Daily Inquirer
Neal Cruz

The sun was bright and hot Monday morning, but while President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was delivering her State of the Nation Address in the afternoon, heavy rains fell, accompanied by plenty of thunder and lightning, so heavy that many streets were flooded and traffic were brought to a standstill. How could it have been so bright in the morning and then raining so heavily in the afternoon?

Old folks have the answer to that. They say that when somebody lies big, God sends lightning to strike the liar. When somebody is obviously lying, the usual warning is “Baka tamaan ka ng kidlat” (You might be hit by lightning). So somebody must have been lying big Monday afternoon.

Who was it? The answer is obvious. Arroyo was then painting a picture of the Philippines as a paradise on earth with herself as the miracle-worker who made it possible. No wonder the heavens opened up. That was obviously a big lie. Fortunately, not one of the thousands of protesters outside the Batasang Pambansa was hit by lightning. The targets of the lightning’s anger were safely inside the concrete Batasan.

While Arroyo was hallucinating inside the Batasan, two opposition leaders, Bayan Muna Rep. Satur Ocampo and Senator-to-be Koko Pimentel gave their own SONAs at the Kapihan sa Manila.

Arroyo will cite statistics and figures (whose accuracy cannot be checked) to show that she is the best president the Philippines ever had and that she is God’s gift to the Filipinos, Ocampo and Pimentel said, but it is not difficult to determine whether she is telling the truth or not. Just ask yourself: Am I better off today than before Arroyo became president? Am I happier today than before? Is the price of galunggong (scad) higher or lower than before?

Obviously, the answers are in the negative. Everybody, with the exception of Arroyo’s Cabinet members and allies in Congress, is worse off today than before she became president, Ocampo and Pimentel said. There are more jobless Filipinos now. There are more poor Filipinos now even as Arroyo’s allies became richer. There are more squatters, more children out of school, more street children who sniff rugby to forget their hunger, more pitiful scavengers who survive by picking rotting food from garbage cans. Indeed, there are more hungry Filipinos now.

And yet the President has the temerity to say with a straight face that her administration has provided several million more jobs to Filipinos, and that there are fewer out-of-school children now. And this takes the cake: The number of hungry Filipinos, she said, has been reduced to only two million! That’s an achievement she is bragging about? There are two million Filipinos who are hungry during her term and she is proud of that?

Not a single person should ever be hungry but here is our President bragging that there are two million Filipinos who went hungry during her shift.

She said she has been able to provide millions of jobs to Filipinos. Where are those jobs? Why are there so many Filipinos looking and begging for jobs and not finding any?

Maybe she is referring to the hordes of Filipinos who are forced to go abroad, risking being raped or being decapitated by tyrannical regimes, to be able to support their families. They do not want to work abroad and leave their families behind, but they have no choice—there are no jobs in their own country. In fact, were it not for these OFWs, the Philippine economy which Arroyo claims is strong, thanks to her expert guidance, would have gone kaput a long time ago. It was the blood, sweat and tears of our OFWs, not that of Arroyo, that have kept our economy afloat this far.

Arroyo bragged about the infrastructure projects, the roads and bridges that her administration has constructed without mentioning that they are the most expensive roads and bridges in the world. At least half of the cost of each project goes into private pockets. Remember the short street at the reclamation site named after her father, President Diosdado Macapagal? That qualifies in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most expensive street in the world as though it is paved with gold. She did not mention this in her SONA.

She did not mention, either, her achievements in the war against graft and corruption because she has no achievement in that area. Under her term, graft and corruption has not gone down. On the contrary, they have flourished. Because some of its best practitioners are ensconced in Malacañang itself and in her own Cabinet.

But to be fair, I will cite some genuine achievements of the President. She has been trying mighty hard to reduce our population because overpopulation has been hindering our growth. Even world agencies have acknowledged that our population is being reduced through assassinations and disappearances. For the latter, the credit goes to the military. It has done an excellent job in making people disappear.

The Arroyo administration has complained of unjustly getting a bad press. But it is doing something about that. No, it is not suing journalists for libel (it is only the First Gentleman who does that). It is solving the problem in the surest and most direct way—by looking the other way while offending journalists are assassinated.

I am not saying that the administration itself is doing the assassination. What it is doing is doing nothing. By not catching the assassins, it encourages more of them. And the more assassins, the more pesky journalists out of the way.

How about peace and order, what has Arroyo done about it? To answer this, let me retell a joke during the Marcos regime. Asked about it, Imelda replied: I am all for peace and order. I want this piece, and this piece, and this piece. And that’s an order.

The same applies to Arroyo.