LuisTeodoro.com

Deposed president Joseph Estrada performed nearly as expected during a Senate hearing Malacañang had earlier predicted would turn into “a circus.”

Except that the Senate hearing on the controversial contract of the Argentine firm Industrias Metalurgicas Pescarmona S. A. (IMPSA) with the Philippine government to construct the Caliraya-Botocan-Kalayaan (CBK) power plant complex did not exactly turn into a three-ring spectacle, but into an opportunity for Estrada to give vent to his frustrations and resentments.
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In countries riven by armed conflict, the reasons for creating a government of national unity are urgent enough. The most compelling is the need to end political violence so the country involved can go on to the business of reconstruction. The fundamental aim is to have a basis for a new beginning. Such a beginning, however, can only be meaningful if there is a real effort to wipe the slate clean, and if antagonists work together as equals.

The need to address the causes of conflict so that it may not break out again is far more important, however, than that immediate aim. A government of national unity thus enlists major protagonists in the effort to forge the policies that would root out the bases for the disaffection of those groups that have taken up the gun.
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Along certain jeepney routes, children as young as four will clamber into a passenger jeepney or bus even before it’s completely stopped to wipe the passengers’ shoes with a rag in exchange for a few centavos. In some cases it’s a team of brothers or brother and sister, with the older helping the younger get into the moving vehicle by almost throwing him/her into it, of course at considerable risk to life and limb to both.

At the hole-in-the-wall tiendas in the alleys and back streets of Manila’s University Belt where students eat, bands of street children wait for whatever the eaters will leave on their plates, staring hungrily at the food in the meantime. Sometimes they can’t even wait, and grab morsels from the tables. The same thing is happening right within a school campus, in the 500-hectare University of the Philippines enclave in Diliman.
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If President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s December 30 announcement of her noncandidacy in 2004 provoked any enthusiasm, it was because of the hope that she would henceforth craft the policies and make the decisions that would address the country’s galaxy of problems unhindered by her political ambitions.

Apparently the belief was widespread that her previous decisions, policies and actions had been primarily colored by her assumed candidacy. Everywhere Mrs. Arroyo goes nowadays she is enthusiastically cheered by a public that had earlier been either indifferent or hostile to her. Her November 2002 plus six approval rating was a result of the equally widespread perception that the conditions of life in this archipelago had become progressively worse under her administration. Today, however, the same public applauds her for saying that she won’t run in 2004, in apparent relief over that decision.
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Those who expected the politicians to stop politicking because of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s December 30 speech will be disappointed. They won’t. It’s what they do, and despite the conventional complaint that they do too much of it, what they do is indispensable to the democratic process.

There’s a reason for all that attention on who’s going to run when, and under what circumstances. Politicians’ eyes are necessarily focused on elections, and there’s no helping that, because elections are what get them employed. The primary issue in our case should not be politics by itself, but politics for what purpose and in whose interests.
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Did she think President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was sincere about not running in 2004? Former President Corazon Aquino replied with what she thought was a rhetorical question: What could Mrs. Arroyo gain by being otherwise?

Mrs. Aquino’s response was typical. Most of the public, the Church and most of the media have focused on what Mrs. Arroyo has lost, not on what she has gained—which might very well be, at this moment, 15 percentage points or more in her low + six approval rating. The boost to her popularity—Mrs. Arroyo was roundly cheered—was evident at the EDSA shrine where she and Mrs. Aquino attended a unity Mass.
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President Gloria Macapagal’s announcement that she will not run in 2004 has met, it seems, with universal approval and even admiration.

Both opposition and administration senators, for example, praised the announcement as, in so many words, an act of statesmanship and selfless sacrifice.
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