Exposes for Senate, not SONA

One of the reasons why President Ferdinand Marcos hated Senator Ninoy Aquino so much was the ability of the latter to come up with a seemingly endless stream of well-researched exposes against the dictator that he delivered with great bombastic speeches on the Senate floor.

Of course, the main reason why Marcos wanted Ninoy out of the picture was his great fear that the senator was well on course toward snatching the presidency away from him. But that is another story best left to history to tell and retell and to judge.

My concern is about Ninoy’s only son and namesake, Benigno Simeon Aquino III, nicknamed Noynoy, who as fate would have it is now the country’s president. To me, President Noynoy Aquino was not the senator his father was. And that could tell heavily on his presidency.

You may ask what does it matter if Noynoy was not the senator his father Ninoy was, since that is an aspect of the past that has already been overtaken by events now that he is president and not just a senator.

I think it matters a lot if Noynoy had been like the senator his father was, because that could have caused him a lot less headaches now that he is president and I have his just-delivered State-of-the-Nation Address to prove it.

As it turned out, a lot of people were disappointed by the SONA for two reasons — they did not see much of the “shock and awe” they have been made to expect, and neither have they been amply clarified as to “how” we are to get to where Noynoy is taking us.

Actually, I am a person who does not give much importance to the SONA, thinking of it as a mere ritual perpetuated to showcase the political trappings of democracy. To me, the president does not even have to have a SONA if he can let actions speak for themselves.

To me, the SONA is just the middleman between the talking and the doing. So, depending on what the middleman charges us, the true worth of the presidency in action is either marked up or slashed down unnecessarily and unrealistically.

Be that as it may, I say it would have mattered if Noynoy had been the senator his father Ninoy was because of the many things he said in his SONA, which I will take seriously this one time just to prove my point.

The many controversial and allegedly anomalous situations and transactions that President Noynoy underscored in his SONA would not have hounded him this early in his presidency if he had been, as I said, the kind of senator his father was.

The contents of his SONA were precisely the grist upon which the mills of then Senator Ninoy Aquino endlessly run. The supposed MWSS abuses, favoritism in allocation of resources, overspending in vital purchases — all these could have been exposed while Noynoy was a senator.

These are things that do not come to light only during the presidency of an individual. If something truly smells, it should be offensive to most everybody, especially to senators who exercise great oversight powers.

Which brings me to my point — that if Ninoy Aquino, President Noynoy’s father, had been alive today, he would have been able to sniff out these alleged anomalies and exposed them with great bombast in the Senate, without waiting to be president.

Because no one really knows, least of all Noynoy, if one will ever get to be president. The best thing to do, therefore, especially if one had the oversight powers of a senator, is to seize the moment and expose anomalies on sight.

Had Noynoy realized he was president of an entire nation, pretty congresswoman Lucy Torres would not have had to endure listening to how MWSS abuses affect water services in Metro Manila because, frankly, her constituents in Ormoc City are too detached from the issue to care.