'It's the real thing'

President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III has every reason to grin from ear to ear when he flew back to Manila from the United States early dawn yesterday. Fresh from his first official trip abroad, the President has arrived from his successful debut as a leader-speaker before the United Nations (UN) General Assembly last week which was held in New York. 

As expected, one newspaper came out with a screaming headline that the President brought back $2.8 billion “bacon” from his just concluded US trip. But I thought he ate hotdog in New York? Levity aside, that much talked about P-Noy’s hotdog-eating while drinking his favorite can of regular Coke in New York’s 45th Street earned a lot of goodwill for the Philippines. 

In fact, half of that amount or $1 billion will come from new investments from the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co. Coca-Cola Pacific Group president Glenn Jordan personally told about his company’s new investment plans in the Philippines when he met with P-Noy in New York. In an official statement, Coca-Cola announced its company’s additional investments that would come to the Philippines in the next five years.

According to Jordan, the Coca-Cola operations in the Philippines will further expand once the construction of a “mega” bottling facility in Misamis Oriental is completed next year. It will be one of the largest bottling plants of Coke in the region outside the US. The Philippine bottling operation is among the biggest 10 Coca-Cola bottlers globally, they claimed. Coca-Cola Philippines operates 23 plants and 42 sales offices all over the country, with over 7,800 direct employees. The soft drink giant has been locally produced in the Philippines since 1912.

It pays to have a Coke-drinking President like P-Noy who is a walking advertisement for Coke. He never leaves his house — and even now that he lives at the Bahay Pangarap in the Palace — without baon of cans of regular Coke. It’s the real thing for him.

Jiggy Cruz, a nephew of P-Noy once revealed in a TV talk show that if they want to make sipsip (suck up) to their Uncle Noy, the trick is to give him ice-cold can of Coke, especially if they want to ask him a favor.

The Coca-Cola expansion plan in the Philippines is the single biggest bulk of new investments that P-Noy brought back from his US trip. And yet he did not even make a visit to Coke’s headquarters in Atlanta. It was former President Fidel V. Ramos who was the first Philippine President to have done so. I covered that tour of the Coke headquarters in Atlanta as part of the itinerary of the first presidential state visit of Ramos in the US in 1993.

That Coca-Cola investment is being matched by another $1 billion worth of investment from an American power generation firm AES which is reportedly pouring this amount to expand the capacity of Masinloc power plant up to 660 megawatts. From an official announcement from the Palace, the AES project will generate 1,500 new jobs during the three to four-year construction period of this new base load power plant.

The rest of the new investments or $400 million come from other US companies and the rest is accounted for by the $434 million in grants from the US Millennium Challenge Corp. So it is not a surprise why the President appeared to be still in “Cloud 9” when he deplaned from a 13-hour direct flight with Philippine Airlines (PAL) from San Francisco, California.

It’s not clear yet how chain-smoking P-Noy survived the supposed “no smoking” flight. We could just imagine scenarios of the PAL pilots and attendants, who are still not in good terms with their management, making special accommodations for the Commander-in-Chief.

It was a stark contrast when the Chief Executive left Manila on Sept. 20 when he reportedly got irked as he saw his photo emblazoned on the arrival/departure card issued to passengers at the airport named after his slain father, the late Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr.

Thus, before he left, the President barked orders to airport officials to make sure he would not see his face again on these arrival/departure cards when he gets back to Manila. And sure enough, the President came back happy to see his order carried out this time accordingly. 

The Bureau of Immigration as the government agency that issues these arrival/departure cards, immediately complied with the presidential directive. They printed out, albeit, grudgingly, new arrival/departure cards that no longer carry the President’s face.

Actually, the BI is still asking the Palace to reconsider the decision to recall the arrival/departure cards and allow the bureau to use up the remaining cards with the Aquino photo on it. The BI reportedly had already printed about a year’s supply, or an estimated 18 to 20 million copies of the arrival/departure cards and distributed these to some 34 members of the Airline Operators Council (AOC).

Since January, the BI reportedly took control of the distribution of the arrival/departure cards to passengers at the airport terminals. BI allegedly signed a contract with X-tend, Inc., allegedly for 10 years, to print the cards at a cost of P5 per copy. Airline industry sources claim they were able to have the same cards printed for only P1.50.

But now they have this problem after the President found out that his photograph was printed on the front page of the cards without his permission. He would not have known about it had he not embarked on this trip to the US, his first travel outside the Philippines after assuming office.

The presidential reaction was predictable. Just I suspected when I first saw the P-Noy photo on arrival/departure cards when I left for Shanghai last month. The President was just being consistent with his policy against the use of presidential photos on government projects plastered on billboards or signage.

The arrival/departure cards used to bear the photo of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. But after the end of her term on June 30, all these arrival/departure cards bearing her photo were revoked and replaced, of course, with the smiling P-Noy on the cover.

But when the real P-Noy stepped in the airport and saw them, all of these cards flew out. It’s the real thing now.