Roco resignation accepted

Raul Roco finally met with President Arroyo yesterday, but there was no turning back for the resigned secretary of education.

After a one-hour meeting at Malacañang, the President formally accepted Roco’s "irrevocable" resignation, Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye announced .

The President was deeply saddened by "the loss of a good public servant," Bunye said.

"Secretary Roco’s resignation is an unfortunate reaction to what is after all the common situation of all public servants, which is to be open to all types of public complaints and to defend one’s self in a fair investigation," Bunye told reporters, reading from a prepared presidential statement.

Roco had complained that Mrs. Arroyo lacked basic courtesy when she forwarding to the Presidential Anti-Graft Commission (PAGC), without informing him, a resolution filed by the Department of Education (DepEd) Employees Union seeking his ouster.

On Tuesday, Roco resigned in a fit of anger following media declarations by PAGC chairman Dario Rama that he was being investigated on graft complaints filed by the DepEd Employees Union. The President endorsed a Roco investigation on Aug. 1, the day a survey by the IBON Foundation revealed Roco would trounce Mrs. Arroyo if a presidential election was held at the time of the conduct of the survey.

Roco was the second Cabinet member to resign in little over a month.

Vice President Teofisto Guingona Jr., who was perceived to have been pressured by Mrs. Arroyo to resign, vacated the post of foreign affairs secretary on July 3 after repeated public and private quarrels with Mrs. Arroyo on policy issues, notably the presence of the US troops in the country.

Bunye said Roco’s "resignation is even more unfortunate as the investigation that had just been started is also an opportunity to show these charges as unfounded. We are all duty-bound to resolve complaints from the people we serve."

"The President regards this as merely the end of one chapter in Secretary Roco’s service to the people. She looks forward to working with him in some other capacity in the future," he said. He did not elaborate on this particular point.

A still-visibly angry Roco appeared on "Debate" TV talk show on GMA-7 on Thursday night and narrated that the President could have indeed plotted to ease him out of the Cabinet.

"The President referred to the PAGC the resolution filed by the DepEd Employees Union that seeks my replacement. If the order of the President took that form, it appears that she was more inclined to believe in the DepEd union. I was a member of the official family and I was not even asked about it," Roco told the show.

However, Roco rejected suggestions he was being decimated because he posed a political threat to Mrs. Arroyo’s ambitions in the 2004 elections. He said the suggestions were "unfair" and refused to be drawn into commenting on it.

He insisted that the President’s move to refer his case to the PAGC was not merely "ministerial."

"It was like being run over by a vehicle and then the driver says sorry. There is no such thing as ministerial when you are president. There is always an exercise of discretion of leadership," he said.

Roco, head of the Aksyon Demokratiko party that draws in the youth and women’s vote, made a strong showing by placing third in the 1998 presidential elections despite the absence of a well-funded political machinery.

Malacañang was stunned by Roco’s resignation and scrambled to limit a political fallout. Functionaries close to the President downplayed the PAGC investigation, claiming the presidential endorsement of the probe was merely ministerial action.

Malacañang insisted the investigation was "routinary" and two other Cabinet members, Health Secretary Manuel Dayrit and Justice Secretary Hernando Perez, were also investigated by the PAGC.

The difference between the investigations was that Roco’s probe was made public while those of Dayrit’s and Perez’s were completed without media glare.

The PAGC investigation on Roco was spawned by allegations that he committed improprieties when he used DepEd funds to publish posters that featured his photograph.

Malacañang meeting

Bunye said the President met with Roco in the presence of his younger brother, Rep. Suplicio Roco Jr. (Aksyon Demokratiko, Camarines Sur), Executive Secretary Alberto Romulo, presidential advisers Victoria Garchitorena and Mai-mai Jimenez, who were perceived to be close to the resigned education secretary.

He emphasized that there was no intention on the part of the President to weed out potential presidential timber from the Cabinet.

Roco failed to show up at Malacañang on Thursday for last-ditch reconciliation talks with Mrs. Arroyo. He said he did not intentionally snub the breakfast meeting — announced by Bunye on Wednesday — that was meant to patch up differences with the President.

He said learned about the meeting from reporters and that there was no formal communication.

Meanwhile, Interior and Local Government Secretary Jose Lina and Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Heherson Alvarez, who were at Malacañang yesterday, defended Mrs. Arroyo, saying that her move to order a Roco investigation was only "ministerial."

The President, Roco, Lina and Alvarez were colleagues in the Ninth Congress.

In a bid to dramatize that Cabinet members could directly call the President, Alvarez placed a call to Mrs. Arroyo using his cellphone but failed to get through. His inability to contact the President became a comic relief.

But this did not prevent him from saying that "it is a good policy for an alter ego (of the President) to call her up, check with her to minimize" tension.

At the Senate, Majority Leader Loren Legarda said yesterday that Mrs. Arroyo’s acceptance of Roco’s resignation would not impact on the Lakas-NUCD.

While admitting that there was the possibility that Roco may draw sympathy from several Lakas members, Legarda said he could not possibly rock the Lakas-NUCD because he belongs to the Aksyon Demokratiko.

Sen. Sergio Osmeña III, on the other hand, said both Roco and the President "painted themselves into a corner."

Osmeña said Roco’s lack of a political machinery at this time is insignificant, citing that political parties do not usually make a presidential candidate, but it is a strong presidential candidate that builds a political party.

"Lakas was nothing before President Ramos rose to power. The Partido ng Masang Pilipino was so small you could place all members in a minivan, but it became a giant party with President Estrada," Osmeña said.

Among those mentioned as DepEd secretary wannabes included Sen. Teresa Aquino-Oreta, former chairwoman of the Senate committee on education; Philippine Normal University president Nilo Rosas, a former DepEd undersecretary; Clark Development Corp. president Emmanuel Angeles, former president of Angeles University; presidential adviser on education Mona Valisno; former Sen. Ernesto Maceda, and former Rep. Salvador Escudero III, former dean of the University of the Philippines-Los Baños. - With Efren Danao