State of the Nation Address

Enough SONA?

Posted July 29, 2009 00:39:00(Mla Time)

Philippine Daily Inquirer
Michael Tan

We really should rethink this State of the Nation Address, which has become an expensive national exercise in masochism especially in the last few years with Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. It’s become excruciating going through the ritual, and yet we seem to relish the agony.

Last year Pulse Asia conducted a national survey and found that among Filipinos who had heard Arroyo’s SONAs, 46 percent said they did not believe her and 41 percent were uncertain. The SONAs are making Filipinos more and more cynical about political leaders.

You can tell from her delivery that Arroyo doesn’t like delivering these SONAs. She knows she’s unpopular and ends up becoming defensive. This last SONA was particularly abrasive and confrontational but then it seems like all the media networks thrive as well on getting people (myself included) to appear on talk shows and tear the SONA apart.

The SONA is another one of those rituals we copied from the Americans, who call it the State of the Union Address, with section 10 of our 1935 Constitution requiring that the president deliver this SONA to Congress. The 1987 Constitution does not refer to it.

Through the years though, the SONA has become another political grandstanding act with claims of incredible accomplishments. They have worsened through the years, reaching the pits with this last one and made worse by the barrage of newspaper ads the last few weeks from government agencies enumerating their accomplishments with Arroyo’s photos and the most inane acronyms created out of her initials (for example, the announcement of lowered drug prices for 16 products had GMA prices beneath her photo, GMA meaning Government Mediated Access).

The SONA itself was just “I did this, I did that” one-liners, with the President pausing after each line to wait for applause. No wonder the speech was applauded more than 100 times. Now that’s masochism, with disturbing similarities, albeit watered down, of similar spectacles in totalitarian regimes where audiences are herded in to listen to some Great Leader, dutifully applauding every few seconds.

True SONA

If we have to have more of these SONAs, then let’s hold the president (or prime minister) accountable to delivering a true State of the Nation Address. Trapped in a system of transactional politics, our presidents feel obliged to sell themselves through a bloated package of alleged accomplishments, a way of saying, “Vote for me again” or, when we took away a second term for presidents, “Be kind to me.” (Instead, with Arroyo, you could almost imagine the public pointing their thumbs down like during the time of the Romans, their way of saying, “Feed him [her] to the lions.”)

It’s time our leaders understood that people might better appreciate their leadership if they had a SONA consisting of an honest appraisal of where we are today, zeroing in on the most pressing problems, explaining why we have those problems (short of admitting misgovernance) and what steps have been taken to try to address those problems. US presidents do that all the time, and have become quite clever in shifting part of the burden of solving problems to the citizenry, exemplified by John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for the country.”

That was actually Kennedy’s inaugural speech in 1961 but this is taking me to another point. What has happened is that we have a President who was not made for public speeches, so she relies on this SONA, painfully delivered, to try to connect to the nation once a year. Yet the 1935 Constitution had a different take on the SONA: “The President shall from time to time give to the Congress information on the state of the Nation, and recommend to its consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”

Ideally then, national leaders should be addressing the nation more often and use the speeches throughout their term - from the inaugural to a valedictory (which we had all hoped Arroyo would deliver)—to identify the problems and recommend action.

US President Barack Obama has been doing this, delivering speeches in Congress to prod legislators on urgent bills that need to be passed, for example, the bail-out plan for US companies that were going bankrupt, or recently, a bill to reform the entire health care system.

A presidential speech becomes a way of tagging an issue to be of high priority and urgency, and people end up feeling the president cares. It also educates the public, helps them understand the complexities of the problem and what they need to do about it. No grand rhetoric here about a strong republic.

Call to battle

Arroyo isn’t an orator, but she could have put her combativeness to good use by delivering a presidential speech on pressing issues. She could have delivered a speech pointing out how Filipinos are dying from lack of medicines and warning the drug companies to bring down their drug prices or face government intervention with price controls. Right now companies like Pfizer are defying the government because they don’t see a strong enough president.

In her SONA, Arroyo talked too about more sin taxes (taxes on tobacco and alcohol) but that one-liner disappears in her long list of dubious achievements. If she were serious about sin taxes, she could have delivered a speech in Congress endorsing a bill with strong provisions on such taxes, and earmarking those taxes specifically for health and social services. She could also have indicated her resolve to prosecute tax evasion cases against Lucio Tan, the No. 1 tobacco and liquor magnate. People will then remember such speeches not as empty promises but as a battle call of a determined leader.

Since we borrowed the SONA from the Americans, I might as well cite another US president for an example of a speech that unites and inspires. Especially with the global financial crisis upon us, it’s helpful to remember that President Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1931, right in the middle of the Great Depression. But at the beginning of his speech, he delivered this famous line: “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

Obama will have many similar quotable quotes from his speeches, from the very simple “Yes we can” punctuating his victory speech in November 2008 to the deeper statements in his inaugural in January 2009. He will be held accountable for many of those statements, and with Arroyo visiting him in a few days, I hope he will remember what he said in that inaugural: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”