A legacy of his own and what his successor can build on
President Benigno Simeon Aquino III’s last State of the Nation Address
Former president Corazon “Cory” Aquino bowed out of office with all humility after she weathered the many storms as top leader of the country, transitioning from dictatorship to a democracy.
She dedicated her last State of the Nation Address (SONA) to the only man she loved in her life — late husband and senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr. — and to the country and people she served.
Her only son and current president, Benigno Simeon “Noynoy” Aquino III, will also stand before Filipinos today to report to his “bosses” the gains of his administration in the last five years.
“As president, I have never prayed for anything for myself; only for our people... I hope that history will judge me as favorably as people still regard me, because, as God is my witness, I honestly did the best I could,” Mrs. Aquino said in the last SONA she delivered before Congress on July 22, 1991.
The so- called “Tita Cory magic” did last long, in fact, until she died in August of 2009, catapulting her son to the presidency. Proverbial as it may seem, Mrs. Aquino told the Filipinos in her last SONA, “that while my power as president ends in 1992, my responsibility as a Filipino for the well-being of my country goes beyond it to my grave.”
Mr. Aquino, her son, also remains popular after five years in office but has not been exempted from tremendous challenges himself. While his mother had to deal with several military coups that she said overturned the powerful rebound of the economy in less than a year in 1986, the president also had his pitfalls such as the Manila hostage crisis in 2010, the Disbursement Acceleration Program and the Mamasapano incident in January this year.
Natural disasters have also been disrupting the country’s growth. Super
Typhoon Yolanda in 2013 tested his resolve, along with the Zamboanga City crisis and the powerful earthquake that destroyed parts of Cebu and Bohol.
There are other major challenges that Vice President Jejomar Binay, a declared presidential candidate in 2016 who resigned as member of the Cabinet in June to become leader of the opposition, has been highlighting — the sorry state of the Metro Rail Transit 3 or the supposed lack of genuine inclusive growth that the Aquino administration has been striving to achieve, traffic congestion, flooding, and peace and order in Metro Manila.
One can imagine the pressure on the chief executive to convince his bosses that their trust and confidence in him are all worth it. He might feel the urge to cite every fact and figure to back his successes if only to prove he has been true to his promises and the Filipinos are never shortchanged with him at the country’s helm.
But respect is earned not asked for, and Mr. Aquino can only hope that the people will look into his heart when they make an assessment.
His mother did away with the numbers in her last SONA and allowed herself to let loose some emotions and be vulnerable in front of the people. Who, after all, can possibly solve the country’s woes on their own?
“Five years have passed. My term is ending. And so is yours. As we came, so should we go. With grateful acknowledgment to the man who made it possible for us to be here. A man who discovered hope in the starkest despair and has something yet to teach a country facing adversity again,” Mrs. Aquino said, referring to “Ninoy” who was assassinated in 1983 after many years of fighting the Marcos dictatorship.
In every opportunity, the president pays tribute to his parents in his speeches and other pronouncements at the risk of staying in their shadows. But the achievements of his own administration, Mr. Aquino believes, will bless him with his legacy that his successor can build on.
People power and continuity
Like his mother, the president points out the importance of investing in the people to empower them more. He reformed the education system, for example, and introduced the K to 12 program to make it at par with international standards while addressing shortages in classrooms, textbooks and other needs of public schools.
Mrs. Aquino started the free secondary education, and during her time, 660,000 young people immediately availed themselves of it.
The conditional cash transfer program was also expanded to cover high school students and addressed not just hunger and poverty, but health and educational needs of the families. It also reduced child labor, school dropouts as well as maternal and child mortality.
The Social Weather Stations’ (SWS) most recent self-rated survey on hunger saw a significant drop in the number of families experiencing involuntary hunger: from 16.3 percent in June 2014 to 12.7 percent.
According to the SWS, this is the lowest recorded rate in 10 years, since May 2005.
The CCT program now covers over 4.4 million households. Apart from this, Malacañang said inflation had also been kept down and the prices of basic commodities remained relatively steady, in part due to the government’s efforts to ensure the consistency of food supply in the country.
After 20 years, membership coverage in the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. has grown to 81.63 million beneficiaries or 82 percent of the population of almost 100 million. PhilHealth says this will translate to at least four out of every five Filipinos now enrolled in the program and the target this year is to cover the remaining 18 percent of the population through various initiatives that will make it easy for them to register.
The Philippine Statistics Authority reported the country’s unemployment rate declined to 6.4 percent in April from seven percent in the same month in 2014. Results of the Labor Force Survey released by the PSA indicated that the number of unemployed Filipinos declined by 243,000 as of April 2014.
Led by the strong performance of the services and industry sectors, total employment also grew by 1.3 percent in April. This translated to a total net job generation of 495,000 and reduced the total number of unemployed Filipinos to 2.7 million.
The gut issues are being attended to but still, there is so much more to do.
In the words of Mrs. Aquino, ”Empowering the people means more than just giving them elections every three years. It means enlarging their contact with government beyond elections to its daily workings so that the vast resources of one support the initiatives of the other, and the policies of government are refined by the insights of the people.”
This means the lives of the people shall be constantly improved and the people themselves empowered by the habit of directing their own government, she said.
“The constant revision of flawed policies and the wider application of good ones are possible only by bringing
“As president, I have never prayed for anything for myself; only for our people… I hope that history will judge me as favorably as people still regard me, because, as God is my witness, I honestly did the best I could.” — Former president Corazon Aquino
SONA, July 22, 1991
together the people and the government. People empowerment, through people’s organizations, non- government organizations (NGOs), foundations and cooperatives, is the surest means we know to make government mirror the aspirations of the people,” Mrs. Aquino emphasized.
”In the past, the idea was to give the people just enough power to elect their mistakes and suffer the consequences until the next elections. Elections were a safety valve. We want elections to be just one of other more effective means to bring the people into government and government to the people, to make it truly a participatory democracy,” she said.
Participatory democracy, according to Mrs. Aquino, will end the practice of punishing provinces and municipalities for the wrong vote in the last poll and will separate elections, where the people vote for their favorites.
” This administration has made large steps in that direction. To the disappointment of those who marched with me against the Marcos regime, my administration has plowed resources into regions and provinces where I was cheated in the snap elections. The politics of revenge had had its day,” Mrs. Aquino said, something that her son could share too in his last address to the people.
The organized participation of the people in daily government may provide the stabilizing element that government has always lacked, she said, noting that policies has radically changed with each administration, yet the basic needs of its unchanging constituencies have not been met — less bureaucracy for business, more public services and infrastructure support for agriculture and industry, and economic safety net for the common man.
“The active participation of the people in government will lend proper direction and continuity to policy. This is what I wish for most. That after me, the continuity of our work is not broken. So that things well done shall be completed, and the same mistakes avoided by succeeding administrations. In this way, nothing done shall go to waste, and the light of a misplaced candle shall still be valued for the light it sheds on the things to avoid,” Mrs. Aquino said.
”I am not asking that all my programs be blindly followed by my successor. God knows, we have made mistakes. But surely, our objective is right — the improvement of our people’s lives. And the new way is much better than those before. To give the people greater power over their lives is the essence of democracy that we must strive to bring out completely,” she said.
Democracy and economy
The president, who ran and won with the battlecry that there would be no poor if there were no corrupt officials, is lucky to have reached the homestretch of his term without getting implicated in a corruption scandal despite the DAP and Priority Development Assistance Fund or pork barrel scam.
Mr. Aquino did manage to send his predecessor and now Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to jail and ousted then Supreme Court chief justice Renato Corona and ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez.
Three senators — Juan Ponce Enrile, Jinggoy Estrada and Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. — are also in prison for alleged involvement in the PDAF scandal.
The chief executive did let go of some of his friends and allies who were tagged in irregularities and had them charged. His favorite cop, ex-Philippine National Police chief Alan Purisima and 10 others were dismissed from the service by the Office of the Ombudsman for entering into an anomalous contract.
The Ombudsman also approved the conduct of preliminary investigation proceedings against Purisima and other police officials allegedly responsible for the Mamasapano encounter that claimed the lives of 44 Special Action Force operatives.
Through all these difficulties, Aquino faced criticisms thrown at him and his officials and survived destabilization, impeachment and coup talks.
Mrs. Aquino highlighted in her last SONA that despite the coups and economic gains that were hostages to fortune, “democracy” was the country’s one steadfast and unalloyed achievement.
Economic progress, she said, could strengthen democracy, but more than that, it was people empowerment.
Following the Mamasapano crisis, the president enumerated his administration’s achievements last March: 2014 as the banner year for net foreign direct investments, which reached an all-time high of $6.2 billion or 65.9 percent higher than in 2013; an average gross domestic product growth of 6.3 percent from 2010 to 2013 compared to the 4.3 percent average of the previous administration; 6.1 percent GDP growth in 2014 despite the lingering effects of Typhoon Yolanda and uncertainty in the global economy; and upgrade to investment grade by all three major credit ratings agencies in 2013.
“My father offered his life so our democracy could live. My mother devoted her life to nurturing that democracy. I will dedicate my life to making our democracy reach its fullest potential: that of ensuring equality for all. My family has sacrificed much and I am willing to do this
again if necessary.”
— President Benigno Aquino III
According to Mr. Aquino, the government’s infrastructure spending already comprises five percent of GDP by 2016, which is focused on accelerating infrastructure development through the Public-Private Partnership program (PPP).
Ten PPP projects have already been awarded and the PPP Center is eyeing to award 13 more before the end of the president’s term.
Mr. Aquino also assured his administration would improve the power supply situation in the country, noting that “a total of 48 committed incoming power projects with 4,693.6 megawatts of power are expected to come online between now and 2018.”
“Out of these 48 power plants, 21 will be from renewable energy, in line with our goal of diversifying our energy mix and building a power supply that is as clean and reasonably priced as possible,” the president said.
A bill is now pending in Congress to institutionalize the PPP for the financing, construction, operation and maintenance of infrastructure facilities and services. The proposed PPP Act provides for more liberalized government regulations and procedures to better address the needs and concerns of PPP investors.
A number of services in utilities, transportation, property development and information technology are provided through contractual arrangements such as the build-operate-transfer (BOT) in the past decades.
Despite this, Sen. Juan Edgardo Angara, who filed the bill, said the full potential for the synergy of the public and private sectors in improving and expanding the country’s infrastructure has not been fully taken advantage of.
Angara, chairman of the Senate ways and means committee, noted that the government has traditionally been in charge of providing and financing infrastructure in the country, but investment requirements have exceeded the capacities of the government, prompting the public sector to enable private participation in infrastructure development.
“For the country to build on its recent economic gains and to ensure the proper investment environment in our country, the private sector must be further encouraged to make investments through a modernized and enhanced PPP law,” Angara said.
The projects also become more secure from political interference through PPP despite changes in administrations, mainly because the private sector participants will be the ones to ensure the continuity and completion of their respective business ventures.
Carrying the torch forward
The president signed landmark pieces of legislation since he assumed office, cracked the whip to improve the country’s weather forecasting and disaster preparedness, revived or finished programs and projects pending for decades and received good feedback from his appointments to the Commission on Elections, the PNP and the Armed Forces of the Philippines prior to the national polls next year.
The analysis of how Mr. Aquino performed in the last five years can be long and endless, but for him, what’s most important is not to regret anything.
“My father offered his life so our democracy could live. My mother devoted her life to nurturing that democracy. I will dedicate my life to making our democracy reach its fullest potential: that of ensuring equality for all. My family has sacrificed much and I am willing to do this again if necessary,” Mr. Aquino said in his inaugural address.
“I will not be able to face my parents and you who have brought me here if I do not fulfill the promises I made. My parents sought nothing less, died for nothing less, than democracy and peace. I am blessed by this legacy. I shall carry the torch forward,” the president added.
“My hope is that when I leave office, everyone can say that we have traveled far on the right path, and that we are able to bequeath a better future to the next generation,” he said.