Arroyo to publish two books on governance

FOLLOWING the coffeetable books of First Gentleman Jose Miguel "Mike" Arroyo, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will also publish her own books.

Chief Presidential spokesperson Ricardo Saludo said Thursday that they will release two books documenting Mrs. Arroyo's achievements.

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"The first one is about her achievements to be entitled beat the odds, the second one is just an inside story on several sort of crisis point entitled beating the odds," Saludo said.

Unlike the book of Mr. Arroyo, these two books will not be used as medium to answer controversies and anomalies surrounding the President.

Saludo said the book will not be written by Mrs. Arroyo and it will not be a personal piece of writing.

The book will center on several crisis that the Arroyo administration had survived during her nine years of governance.

"Its' more of what we did as far as we did to address the SARS issue, what we did to address terrorism, what we did to address drugs. May mga very major battles that we fought and it's just a looking on how we wage on those very important struggles," Saludo noted.

The book will be useful for students to be used as reference. It is also the government's way of reporting the accomplishments of Arroyo administration.

"I think it will be very helpful to academics and people in the government, not necessarily the next administration but any people in the government. I think it will be very helpful for people to people even outside in the country who are involved in governance."

The book will be written by a team of writers.

The main writers of the book about crisis will be Saludo and Rene Velasco while the book about achievements will be handled by deputy presidential spokesperson Gary Olivar.

Saludo dismissed that the book is intended for the next administration "otherwise it would be part of the transition report".

"The books expand, provide the facts whether this is good or bad its opted in the eye of the reader. It provides information and what we think is a fair assessment of what happened," he said.

He added that they are willing to give copies to the opposition for them to see how objective they were in writing the books.

Funding for the books' publication will be done by a commercial outfit and public information agency.

Saludo said data for the books were gathered since 2007 but they still have a lot of things to do before the books will be released.

The two books will be sold to public soon. (Jill Beltran/Sunnex)