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Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Editorial: Sona minus the crisis
* The house is on fire but she doesn't talk about it; instead, she wants family members to plan how the house will be renovated
How could President Arroyo have given the state of the nation without talking about the crisis now raging in the country?
Her administration has been hounded by the wiretapping scandal and allegations of stealing the elections and pocketing jueteng money. The nation is torn apart. Even as she read her Sona in Congress, demonstrators outside clashed in their separate pleas for her to resign and to stay. No less than the legitimacy of her rule was being assailed.
The question demanding an answer is how she would govern amid the turmoil and the unrest. People expected her to remove some of the doubts, calm some of the fears.
She did not.
Not a word, not a line to tell the nation, in sum, how she would lead the people and what they could expect from her as the House sets to work on the impeachment process and the Senate prepares to put her on trial on charges of betraying public trust.
Instead, on Sona super prime time, when the nation stopped to listen, she talked about political changes that, she said, are necessary to remove the causes of the country's troubles.
But is the political system the immediate problem?
Yes, it can be debated upon and the machinery for reform set in motion. The more urgent business at hand though was how the people could be convinced that President Arroyo would uphold and not subvert the impeachment process and how she could still govern when her energy was being spent clinging to her Palace seat and beating off enemies at the gates.
People expected her to deal with the crisis by talking about it in the Sona but the President must have believed it was useful to her cause to ignore it.
To her, it must have been an effective strategy to divert the problem or act as if it wasn't there. To many people, it was a kind of denial.
Intended or not, it was a ruse. "Look," she said in effect, "Not my fault. It's the system. Let's change the system."
But then it was the President's call. A Sona is for a president to use fully or waste utterly.
But to many of us listening, President Arroyo was like the head of the family telling a family council inside a burning house that they better start thinking about renovation to solve their problems. No mention about the fire--it hasn't eaten up everything yet, has it?
(July 27, 2005 issue)
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