Can Estrada Be Re-Invented? By Boo Chanco

Columnist Emil Jurado, Erap's English teacher at the Ateneo, says it is too much to ask Erap to re-invent himself. What you see is what you get. You can't take him away from his barkada, Emil says with finality. Erap is fiercely loyal to his friends, he explains. I get the impression that Emil knows his student well. There lies the problem with this president.

Business World quotes Trade Secretary Jose Pardo, in reference to efforts to address perceptions on political patronage as saying that "(Being) a good leader means you have to turn your back on relationships -- you subordinate that for the greater glory of the country." Mr. Pardo didn't elaborate but he really didn't have to. He said a mouthful. In fact, I think he got it. Someone in this administration finally got it.

If that's the basis of the Erap comeback strategy, I'd say they are on the right track. Actually, that was the track they were on at the start, if the Luneta inaugural speech is to taken seriously. Walang kamag-anak, walang kaibigan, walang kumpare or words to that effect thundered from the newly installed President Erap. That was weeks before the reality of Best World, Mark Jimenez and the midnight barkada came into the picture.

And it is wrong for the President to blame media for his problems. Truth to tell, newspapers have not published as much as 70 percent of the stories going around town about how this barkada got this or that concession. From the perspective of the business community, the impression is of one very uneven playing field. We are afraid to even make a bid, one businessman told me, out of fear we will come up against a competing bid put up by the President's relatives or friends.

Can the President recover? Of course he can. But only if he makes a clean break with those who pulled him down. It will help if he also admits mistakes and move on from losing causes like Concord. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, we can concede the Concord proposals will improve the investment climate. But I doubt if the improvement is commensurate to the national discord it has created and which ate up his storehouse of political capital and scared off the investors.

The administration must also start producing quick and visible results. From the experience of Gen. Lacson, it could be something as simple as ordering the surrender of all carnapped vehicles and dismissing the police officers who disobeyed. Our economic fundamentals are not bad. If we only had more confidence, we should be on our way to growth and development.

It also does not help that career foreign service officers are being thrown by the wayside to give way to political friends. What happened to Ambassador Delia Menez Rosal shouldn't happen to a dog. She served the Republic well for over 37 years, rising through the ranks of the merit-obsessed foreign service officer corps and she isn't even being given a chance to wrap up her tour of duty in Mexico.

Alicia Marquez Lim Coseteng was my teacher in Humanities and Communications at UP and she is one of the better ones there. But at 72, I doubt if she still has the stamina for the physical demands of being envoy to Mexico (given Mexico City's thin polluted air) and half a dozen other Central American republics. But the more important consideration is the fact that our corps of career diplomats is being demoralized by the spectacular growth in the number of political ambassadors in Erap's watch.

Too bad Secretary Jun Siazon, a career diplomat himself, seems too intimidated about losing his own job to stand up and defend the career diplomats. Last time I heard, Sen. Kit Tatad is preparing to take over the foreign office. Jun has reportedly resigned himself to going to Washington DC after Ernie Maceda returns to reclaim a Senate seat.

The Foreign Office was the first beat assigned to me as a young reporter in 1969. I know from first-hand knowledge that the corps of FSOs is one group of government officials we can be truly proud of in terms of competence and integrity. It is a pity their ranks are being decimated by Erap's political friends.

Our column last Monday drew a reply from Smart's Mon Isberto. As expected, Mon denies Smart had anything to do with the Globe blackout we experienced during the New Year's Eve watch at Fort Bonifacio's Global City. Mon surmised that we were just victimized by Globe's congestion problem.

I have news for Mon. We didn't get that far. We couldn't even get Globe's signal -- the Globe logo and the signal bars didn't even show up in our cell phone screens for the five hours we were at the Fort. If it was congestion, we would get a network busy notice after we dialed a number or a message sending failure for SMS. We didn't get that far.

The crazy thing is, the Globe people didn't even know they had a problem. According to Ayala's Danny Gozo, Globe technicians were insisting they could make calls from their Globe phones from the vicinity of Fat Willy's. I wonder what phone models they are using because there were people around us near the Studio 23 tent as well as families in the tent village we were talking to who also couldn't use their Globe phones. Danny did admit they had a serious congestion problem.

I get it. Smart didn't have to block Globe's signal. Globe's congestion problem would have prevented us from getting through anyway. Mon is right: I am barking up the wrong tree. Globe simply has too many subscribers and not enough capacity for all of them. And I doubt Globe did anything special in anticipation of the increased demand on New Year's Eve.

In contrast, Mon says "we expanded as much as possible our capacity in areas where big crowds were expected. So, we augmented our facilities several fold in Fort Bonifacio, the Makati central business district, the Luneta and parts of Quezon City. In Makati, for example, we beefed up our cell sites and pico cell sites in the major hotels and several commercial buildings. At the Luneta, we did the same for the cell sites at and around the Luneta Grandstand where the President led the Millennium Countdown."

I don't know what happened that night but I am sure of the fact that all our Globe phones failed to function at the Fort and started working again as soon as we were out of the Fort and on C-5.