RP’s crying need today — united leadership

By Gerry Garcia

OFF-the-cuff survey of public sentiments relating to the on-going drive to gather a convincing number of signatures in support for the people’s initiative for Charter change . . . .  is bound to be extra-positive. Especially if it’s made by the proponents themselves for Charter change.

But the literature man-in-the-street, bereft of college education, who could at least read the vernacular tabloids enough to be able to get the hang of what he is reading . . . can say without being told there’s something wrong, very wrong, in the government.

The unabated hanky-panky (kurapyon, pare) in government has been  too much publicized to be ignored. And the government is practically doing nothing, naturally, to correct it.

Whoever is the President of the RP is the “most powerful” main in the country and the temptation to become one is drawing rabid applicants from the Opposition, especially the senators who are one step away from the top post. Qualified or not, any senator who has the money and the kapal-muks of popularity, can become President. After all this is a free country and the electrorate is awashed with penny-less voters.

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It’s this wide-spread distrust of, and apparent lack of confidence in presidential government that is fueling an unspoken desire for a change in the style of governance, not in the kind of people in it which will not ever come anyway, as shown in the past many decades.

At least, and apparently it seems, this latent desire for a change in government style is espoused by no less than the incumbent President herself who has all along been supportive of the shift to federal unitary parliament, despite self-serving criticisms played over and over against her like a broken record.

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It’s true we’ve had a unitary Batasang Pambansa some 20 years ago and it didn’t work because it was initiated and was practically owned by the Dictator-president himself. The late Dictator’s unitary parliament had been nothing else but his administration’s rubber stamp.

The drive presently going on to win national approval for Cha-cha, if successful, would be a milestone in the country’s legislative history. It could be a prelude to better times after decades  of the country’s being tied to the rut of Third Worldism.

We’ve good reason to hope this unprecedented move of RP to eventually join her industrially progressive neighbors in   Southeast Asia, which has been initiated and forcefully advocated by Speaker Joe de Venecia for the last 30 years, will finally rid us of the ignominy of being  called the “sick man of Asia”.

It’s about time too that our few remaining veteran lawmakers and their younger sober colleagues in Congress, even minus the talkative over-grown “teenagers” leading the Opposition minority, stopped yakking against “resurrecting the same evil under a new name” and buckle down to work in unity for Charter Change or, better, Charter Amendment . . . to eventually ensure our progress as a developing nation.

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Here is our sincere though belated expression of congratulations to Pangasinan News editor  Phil  Caracas for his paper’s 13th anniversary celebration at Max’s in Urdaneta City last March 17 — a Friday. It was Friday when the PN’s 13th year was marked!

On hand were 5th District Rep. Mark Cojuangco with his pretty wife and also the paper’s publisher himself veteran newsman and Rosales lawyer Alfie Bince.

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