Giving credit where credit is due to PGMA!

First of all, kudos to The Philippine STAR on its 23rd anniversary yesterday! You can say that The Philippine STAR was the first post Martial Law newspaper to have opened. As you all know by now, The STAR came into being because of a corporate row amongst the owners of Philippine Daily Inquirer which strained to the point of breaking up. So the late Betty-Go Belmonte, Art Borjal and Maximo Soliven, the very people who started the Inquirer made that monumental decision to breakaway from the Inquirer and build another newspaper, thus The Philippine STAR was born!

On the very week that the STAR was born, we invited Sir Max Soliven to speak before a group of Cebuano businessmen. But we sent our invitations to the Inquirer offices. However when I met him at the tarmac of the Mactan Cebu International Airport Authority (MCIAA) which was then called the Mactan International (Alternate) Airport, he hand carried a bunch of blue and yellow colored newspaper, which he introduced to me as The Philippine STAR. We were taken aback that Soliven was no longer writing in the Inquirer, and thus during his speech, he gave his Cebuano friends the story why they left the Inquirer and created The STAR.

It was then that he recruited me to be his Bureau Chief… a fancy title to one who wasn’t yet a journalist. A few weeks later, I went to The STAR office and Sir Max gave me my first Press ID dated Aug. 25, 1986 and we have been with The STAR ever since. Twenty-three years later, under the leadership of Sir Miguel Belmonte, The STAR has grown by leaps and bounds and has attained number one status… and like what the STAR ad declares on RJ FM radio, “the only newspaper you read from cover to cover!” To most of the people I meet from the different places I go to, this is a truism for the readers of The Philippine STAR. More power to The STAR!

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As I don’t come out on Mondays and Tuesday, so by now you must have seen on TV or read the various news commentaries about Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s (GMA) State of the Nation Address (SONA) that she did last Monday. Indeed, the problem with the Arroyo Presidency is that she has too many critics and detractors and I would like to say it here that all this is rooted on the reality that with so many people running for President, she ended up as a “Minority” President… something that could happen again in the coming 2010 Presidential polls because there are just too many ambitious people who want to be the President of this country!

But we must give credit where credit is due! As the President pointed out “the Philippine economy had our economic fundamentals intact. The state of our nation is our strong economy…good news for our people, bad news for our critics.” Indeed, her critics hate GMA so much; they would rather see this country sink into a deep sinkhole so she could be blamed for it. For us in the Visayas, who are the beneficiaries of the great Tourism Boom, the President pointed out that Tourism is now a $5-billion industry. Just go to Bohol and you will see that before GMA, they had no tourism to speak of.

The Strong Republic Nautical Highway (SRNH) is also concrete proof of GMA’s infrastructure development that is a tremendous boost to tourism, something that the folks in Metro Manila cannot see because for them it is the North Luzon Expressway (NLEX) or the South Luzon Expressway (SLEX), which unfortunately we in the Visayas can only dream of.

If there was anything new that GMA mentioned in her SONA, it is that she has put P1 billion for fish farming, which means growing fishes away from the sea, which has already been severely affected by dynamite fishing or overfishing and needs to have a respite from all this. I would like to know the mechanics of this fish farming and use it in our farm in Bohol.

Prior to her SONA last Monday, ABS-CBN had coverage of the President’s previous SONAs where she mentioned Charter change as part and parcel of her programs. Hence I found it disappointing that the President finally succumbed to her critics and never even mentioned a word about Cha-cha in her final SONA. She could have redeemed herself if she called for a Constitutional Convention (con-con) to disprove her critics that she wanted Cha-cha in order to extend her term. But let me say that there’s still time!

Finally, we heard from the President these stirring words, “I have never said that I wanted to extend my term…After my speech, I shall step down from this stage, but not from the Presidency as my term doesn’t end till June 30th of next year… until then, I will fight for the ordinary Filipino as the nation comes first.” Again, we must give credit to the President for getting that credit upgrade in the midst of recession and weather the economic storms.

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For email responses to this article, write to vsbobita@mozcom. com or [email protected]. His columns can be accessed through www.philstar.com.