Newfound enthusiasm for Edsa people power
On the 36th anniversary of the Edsa Revolution, Tita Winnie has found it ominous to declare that there is newfound enthusiasm for what Edsa 86 stands for just because Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is running for President. She draws a parallelism between Cory Aquino and Leni Robredo. This was inevitable given the situation that the Yellowidiots face; political irrelevance and oblivion.
Robredo is not exactly a popular Vice-President. In the past five years, she has found it best to be leading the opposition against the Duterte administration. This is despite the fact that the President gave working with her a go by appointing her the Housing Czar, the same post given to then Vice-President Jojo Binay in the Aquino administration. Leni did not last very long in the post because she was busy with interviews for magazine covers and cavorting around with Bolet Banal.
After attending the Yolanda anniversary in Tacloban where the President even ribbed her about her relationship with Banal, Robredo was fired. Duterte was very sensitive about the housing for Yolanda survivors. Under PNoy, the temporary housing was bunkhouses made out of coco lumber and sawali. Months after her appointment, Robredo had not convened a single meeting of the housing agencies under her. For a President who demands results from his Cabinet members, this was unacceptable.
In 2018, I had the opportunity to meet with the individual behind Naga Leaks and Leni Leaks. He is a kababayan of Manay Leni. He knows Bicol and Naga politics well because he was under the tutelage of Manoy Louie Villafuerte. He comes from a prominent family in Naga and was well on the road to a political career which was unfortunately derailed by a deal between Jesse Robredo and Louie Villafuerte who may have been political enemies on the outside but were actually working together. The enmity between the two was just a facade. It was their way of controlling politics in Naga and the rest of Camarines Sur.
I would not go to the extent of saying that he did not have an axe to grind because he did. But such is the norm in Philippines politics. There are no permanent enemies, only permanent interests. But his claim was not without basis either as almost all of the Naga-based personalities he named in his expose’ deactivated their Facebook accounts.
The short of it is the image of Jesse Robredo as a modern-day politico was packaged. His winning the Ramon Magsaysay Award was part of it. It would appear that the same was true with his marriage to Leni Robredo, who was made to apply at the Bicol River Basin Development Authority because of her father’s connections with the powers that be in their hometown. This is par for the course in a country where who you know counts more than what you know.
“They say the presidency is destiny. Perhaps the tribulation that the Vice President had to endure is how the universe is strengthening her for the most difficult job of her life.” With this premise PhilSTAR columnist Andrew Masigan deems it fit to claim that Leni Robredo is ripe for the Presidency in 2022. In his piece “Leni on the right side”, Masigan insists that Robredo “is on the right side of democracy, human rights and due process. She is on the right side of the West Philippine Sea dispute. She is on the right side of good governance, decency and humanitarianism.” Evidently, Robredo’s cheering squad have learned no lessons from 2016 and 2019. They are banking on the very same losing position yet again.
I never liked Leni Robredo since her rise to prominence in 2012 after the death of her husband Jesse who was, at the time, Secretary of the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG). I never liked Jesse either. I was a frequent visitor to the Bicol region in the 90s because I had business to oversee there. We put up the first marine products processing plant at the Camaligan Fishing Port Complex. This was a small fishing port by the bank of the Naga River. There wasn’t much fish being landed. Leave it to the Philippine Fisheries Development Authority to construct fishing ports in some areas where it isn’t even viable. It’s a money-making project whenever that is the case. But still, like BDO’s slogan, we find ways. Octopus landed on the Eastern seaboard of the country are larger than those on the Western seaboard. We had to balance out our size breakdown for our buyers. It was better to process in the provinces because labor was cheaper and we could avoid having to deal with quality issues in Manila on account of the long travel time from the landing areas to Navotas.
Jesse Robredo was being touted as an excellent local government unit (LGU) executive but you don’t hear that from the natives of Naga. His hand was in every viable business in the city, including the central transport terminal. Girls as young as 15 years old were availa/ble from pimps for tourists and natives alike. There was also drugs in steady supply, mostly shabu and marijuana. Naga still had a large number of informal settlers. The situation was worse in Daet, Camarines Norte, so you had the people there going to the more progressive Camarines Sur to find work. Jesse established Kaya Natin shortly after Noynoy Aquino won the Presidency. Robredo was more of a Mar Roxas acolyte. He belonged to the Balay faction. But he also had a moist eye on 2016. His plan was to test the waters in 2013 and run for Senator. If he won, he would consider a Presidential run in 2016. Jesse believed that Mar Roxas wouldn’t be popular enough to win the Presidency. He wanted to be ready with an organization and a machinery. This was Kaya Natin.
His plans were cut short by his death in the plane crash. That incident was bedevilled with inconsistencies. How did his security and aide survive with a broken arm? Why was there no autopsy of the fatalities? Why did the American technical diver who discovered the wreckage die from an apparent rubout? The theory is the security aide of Robredo was the designated asassin and shot Jesse first then waited until the plane was near the Masbate coastline after which he proceeded to shoot the two pilots before jumping off into the open sea. What was the motive?
There had been reports that Robredo was building up dossiers on government officials involved in illegal drugs and gambling. This was found out by Undersecretary Rico Puno who belonged to the Samar faction in the administration of then President Noynoy Aquino. It was precisely the reason why he was given that appointment. The dossiers were part of Jesse’s grand strategy to become President in 2016. He had the image and packaging having won the Ramon Magsaysay Award. He had the support of the non-government organisation (NGO) network and civil society. He was a La Sallite. He resonated with the masses with his so-called Tsinelas Leadership.
Recall how Leni had to seek the intervention of then Justice Secretary Leila De Lima to prevent Undersecretary Puno from opening and entering Jesse’s office at the penthouse of the Landsbergh Place condominium along Tomas Morato which was also the Robredo residence in Manila. That condominium is owned by the Robredo’s. The office at the penthouse unit was where Jesse kept all the dossiers he collated as DILG Secretary. The reason for Leni running for Congress was to keep political pressure on Jesse’s dummies for them to surrender the assets they held in trust for Jesse to Leni. This was probably the reason why Leni couldn’t stop herself from smiling in that now famous photo of her with top government officials standing by Jesse’s bier. She was finally free and with money to boot.
Why were they all smiling instead of grieving?
I wrote the above on August 19, 2021 when the “clamor” began for Leni to run for President. It was obvious that she would be the standard-bearer of the opposition in light of the debacle they suffered in 2016 and 2019 for the simple reason that there is no other viable choice from among their ranks. We all know how the opposition defines “viability.” It is limited to those who would be willing to accept an alliance with leftist-militant groups which are actually CPP/NDF/NPA front organizations.
The problem Robredo has is the public has wisened up to the shenanigans of her fellow Yellowidiots. Except for the diehard faithful, the greater majority of the Filipino people will not be hoodwinked into voting for a Yellow candidate again.
The Yellowidiot strategy is straight out of narcissist’s playbook. The gaslighting, the echo chamber, the self-righteousness, the self-entitlement and the imposition of their will that they are the in the right and everybody else is wrong are all the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. It makes you doubt your own good judgment and in the extreme, makes you question your sanity.
This holds true for the ABC demographic. The greater majority have been consistent in their judgment. If Imelda did not run in 1992, Danding Cojuangco would have won the Presidency. Erap won in 1998 but was ousted. GMA fell out of favor from the Yellowidiots and we had to go through the agonizingly long six years under Noynoy Aquino before Duterte came along and disrupted the political landscape.
The truth is Leni Robredo is nothing but another pretender. The truth is all the other Presidential candidates are the same. Push has come to shove and you now see every one of them throwing everything they can at Marcos because they have run out of plays from their campaign playbook. BBM is popular because the stupid opposition has cast him in the underdog’s role by not allowing the Filipino people to get the Marcos’ out of their political pscyhe.
Anybody But Leni became Angat-Buhay Lahat because the Robredo campaign panicked over the large following generated by Christine Cunanan when she founded the Facebook group. The original group is no more because it was targeted by the Pink Taliban and its fact-checkers. These are the advocates of democracy who are actually budding dictators because they do not tolerate dissent in the platforms they believe to be theirs.
Thirty years is one generation. We have wasted time because of the thirty-year rule of the Yellowidiots under the defective 1987 Constitution which does not provide consistency and continuity in government. We need to address the root cause of our problems before we can become as progressive as our Asian neighbors. It is not only in the political structure but in the mindset as well. We are being held captive by the entitled rich and the entitled poor. Both are leeches in the system to whom our political leaders pander to for campaign financing and votes which is the vicious cycle we have to put an end to.
To my mind, the Yellowidiots are not that much different from the Marcos’. What is different about the Marcos’ is they have a standard to adhere to which is the brilliance of Apo Lakay. Marcos Sr. was not perfect. He succumbed to hubris towards the end. Imelda was the one who did the most damage to his image after she became the designated successor. She cultivated her own power base in the country and her image abroad as a diplomat-at-large for the Philippines. Like them or not, they did leave behind useful legacies such as the infrastructure which was the only time the issue was addressed after the war. It would be another thirty years before this deficit would be addressed again by Duterte.
What is really depressing is how we have been left behind by our Asian neighbors. In the 90s, Manila was right up there with Jakarta and Bangkok dealing with the problems of metropolitan areas choked with traffic and informal settlers. Fast-forward to the present and Metro Manila is the only metropolitan area which has yet to deal with the issue in the region. It is safe to say that if Marcos was not ousted, the face of Metro Manila would not have been worst after thirty years. The cancellation of the implementation of the Metro Manila Development Plan finalized in 1976 is what caused all of this.
The sad reality is that the best choice is not available to Filipinos in terms of leaderhship. Five hundred one years after the Spanish landed in Mactan, we are still the dysfunctional child of our colonial past due to the incestuous nature of our political and economic structures. It is getting worse instead of getting better. We have to arrest this slide before we go off the cliff and plunge into the oblivion of mediocrity which has become the norm rather than the exception. Robredo is representative of this mediocrity. This is why it should not come to pass that she becomes the President in May 9.
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