WHY would anyone listen to advice from Mar Roxas about anything, least of all how to solve the rice crisis? What did Roxas do when he held the reins of power — or when he was so close to them that he could almost taste the top spot — to make him an authority on running a proper government?
And I didn’t come away with any new understanding or insight, apart from the conviction that perhaps Roxas should have picked up a newspaper or two before posting his Facebook treatise, so that he could at least have been updated about what the Duterte administration has been doing to solve the crisis of increasing prices and the lack of stocks of cheap varieties of the staple for the poor.
More importations? President Rodrigo Duterte has been ordering that this be done since the beginning of the year, even if the National Food Authority Council has been repeatedly dragging its feet on the directive; even now, imported rice from the Indochinese countries where they were sourced are already in Manila and other local ports, with more in the pipeline.
Increasing the minimum access volume program? That ship has long sailed, since Duterte has already announced that he is embarking of a program of tariffication for importation by everyone, as long as they pay the proper fees to protect local producers.
Suspending the tax reform program because of its effect on the prices of rice? That’s just plain wrong — and uninformed — because the twin problems of increasing prices and lack of supply of cheap rice have been hardly affected by the usual factors that have been causing food inflation.
Those, in a nutshell, are what Roxas has proposed. All of which leads me to suspect that perhaps giving constructive advice to the Duterte administration wasn’t really the point of Roxas’ social media peroration.
If you take a step backward, perhaps you’ll see the bigger picture — and the real reason why Roxas, Vice President Maria Leonor Robredo, former Commission on Audit chief Heidi Mendoza and even Sen. Antonio Trillanes 4th seem to be making coordinated noises again these days. And it has to do with this annual Yellow gig that they’re calling this year the 46th anniversary of the declaration of martial law by the late President Ferdinand Marcos.
Robredo, of course, has done her bit by contrasting her supposed leadership style to Duterte’s in the aftermath of the devastation caused by the recent Typhoon Ompong. In an interview with the Yellow house organ Rappler, Robredo said that a leader need not be loud and iron-fisted to command respect.
“For me, I’d like to show that there is a different kind of leadership and citizenship than what the present administration is showing us,” Robredo said, channeling all the “soft power” she can muster. “For example, if they’re doing things by force, by shouting, I want to show that you can have better results through calm and quiet courage.”
As for Mendoza — who gained fame during the impeachment trial of the late chief justice Renato Corona by adding up all transactions in the chief magistrate’s dollar account, counting even withdrawals as deposits — she has taken umbrage at Duterte’s expressed displeasure about government auditing regulations during times of calamity. All the way from the United Nations, where she reportedly got a cushy million-dollar-a-year job on the recommendation of her old boss Noynoy Aquino, Mendoza took up the cudgels for government auditors and their procedures — even if the President was not railing against what she did at CoA but about the here and now, because of complaints about the difficulty in accessing calamity funds.
And, finally, there’s the long-running, two-week-long, uninterrupted press conference going on in the Senate, being conducted by Trillanes. Trillanes, in his last media outburst, has been warning darkly not only about his house and his staff being “cased” by supposed government agents but also about possibly joining the Yellow rally on September 21 — as if anyone really cared if he attended or not.
Thing is, you won’t be able to understand Roxas’ attempt at advising Duterte on rice if you don’t take it in the context of the latest bid of the Yellows to gather a critical base of mass support for their continuing campaign to, as one misguided University of the Philippines dean put it, “engineer the overthrow of Duterte.” Of course, whether or not they are even able to attract enough people to join them in their cause is another kettle of galunggong altogether.
But that’s what Roxas, Robredo and their crew do. They will seize any opportunity, no matter how spectral or fleeting, to bring down Duterte, whose 2016 victory they still can’t accept more than two years after the fact.
No one can say when these people will be convinced that theirs is a pointless task. Or when they will run out of funds that will make them stop doing what they’ve been doing since Duterte became president.
But Duterte will not be moved by these half-assed efforts at regime change simply because his greatest strength remains the people themselves. And as long as the people — who long ago realized that the Yellows have never worked to uplift their lives — remain solidly behind Duterte, the best-laid plans of these remnants of the Aquino regime are bound to fail.
Of course, nobody can legally prevent the Yellows from doing what they want, as long as they aren’t violating the law. But it helps to look deeper into what the anti-Duterte forces are doing in order not to fall into the trap that they’re setting for those gullible enough to believe them.
After all, if Mar Roxas can’t even properly explain why he chose those Mahindra police vans over the more reliable brands that our law enforcers have been using for decades now, how can he tell us how to solve the rice crisis? But that message (posted on Facebook, of all places) wasn’t really for Duterte, or he wouldn’t have written the President a letter or used other proper channels.
Mar is just making his presence felt, perhaps even to test the waters for a Senate run next year. But if Roxas thinks that he can just resurface with ideas that aren’t really new or even well-thought out because he thinks people have already forgotten what he and his confederates during the Noynoy years did, then he’s in for a real surprise.
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