Since I don’t have a column tomorrow, allow me to greet The Philippine STAR on its 21st anniversary. I still can’t believe that 21 years have already passed since Sir Max Soliven asked me to join The Philippine STAR as his correspondent for Cebu. For the first time in 21 years, we will have an anniversary minus the original people who formed The Philippine STAR. We shall surely miss Mrs. Betty Go-Belmonte, Art Borjal, Louie Beltran, and Sir Max Soliven.
I learned from Sir Miguel Belmonte that The Philippine STAR celebrates only its major milestone years… so allow me to congratulate the editorial and management staff of The Philippine STAR for their relentless drive for journalism excellence and above all their passion to assure our faithful readers that indeed “Truth Shall Prevail” as inculcated by people like Sir Max and Ma’am Betty Go-Belmonte who created The Philippine STAR after they decided to break away from the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
As Sir Max told me once, “It was one of the most difficult, but the best decision I made in my life.” Twenty years later and looking at the way The STAR Group of Companies is influencing this nation…it was indeed a great decision to have The Philippine STAR which today shines ever so brightly after 21 years in the service of the Philippine nation and journalism.
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In President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) last year the longest standing ovation she got from the audience was when she said that she would “give back power to the people and the regions.” I reckoned then that the President finally realized that it was the regions and provinces outside of Metro Manila that gave her presidency the biggest support. Hence I wrote a column entitled “GMA’s SONA: The Fetus of a Federal Philippines?” Apparently all that hoopla about shifting to a federalized system of governance has started to vanish into thin air.
While the President still talked about the super regions in her SONA last Monday, there was no talk about giving more autonomy to the local government units (LGUs)… and we can only second-guess that federalism has been yanked out of the GMA agenda. Let me remind our readers that when she mentioned federalism in last year’s SONA, this broke down the house filled with governors, mayors and other local government leaders. I noted that this was perhaps GMA’s way of thanking the people outside of Metro Manila for supporting her in her darkest hour, when so many people in Manila believed that she couldn’t even make another SONA!
But today, there are no more threats to her presidency. But we’re writing this to remind the President that when the chips were down, the people in the regions and provinces responded to her call. Unfortunately, there was to be no follow-through on federalism, not even a hint of it in her latest SONA. All I can say is… federalism would have been the greatest legacy that President Arroyo would have left this nation and her people.
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For email responses to this article, write to vsbobita@mozcom.com. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.philstar.com. He also hosts a weekly talkshow, “Straight from the Sky,” shown every Monday, 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.