P-Noy in action

When you walk the talk, people notice.

I wonder if President Noynoy will ever get to know that his visits to the pier and the NAIA certainly got everybody’s attention and I think it would be fair to say that many people must have liked the idea of seeing the President outside his “comfort zone” or the many walls of Malacañang.

There are many possible scenarios on why the President decided to do the rounds and each of them will always be associated to a political agenda. Many in media presume that the President wanted to show that he is an action man and not the “Noynoying character” that the leftists have depicted him to be.

Political observers might say that the visits to the pier and the airport was intended to pre-empt the results of the most recent survey that would show that the President’s trust or approval rating has once again gone down.

I think the President simply wanted to do the traditional inspections before he left for Cambodia, especially since it’s that time of the year when most of the headaches pop up in terms of transportation as well as the fact that this week is the week where we have the highest risk of accidents either by land, sea, or air.

Whatever the motives, I hope P-Noy realizes or discovers that people need to see the real Noynoy who gives a damn about what is happening all around and not the President behind the tele-prompter or polite Malacanang press conferences. People want the President to discover for himself the very problems his people are facing and they want real solutions as only a President can deliver.

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Still on the spot checks at the pier, airport and bus terminals, Secretary Mar Roxas made mention of the idea of charging a “terminal fee” for bus passengers, granting he could make it a requirement for bus companies to build terminals similar to airports.

I am half/half with Roxas on the idea because I really pity children and old people who suffer so much while waiting for their bus inside bus terminals. The fact is bus companies don’t have passenger terminals! What they have are depots or an oversized garage that has plastic chairs and dingy toilets. When it’s hot, kids and the elderly sit under hot tin roofs while inhaling fumes from buses on stand-by or departing from the depot. When it rains they are cold, damp and sometimes even wet.

So I am all out for what Secretary Roxas hinted at, but first build the terminals and then you can force the companies to use them and then you can charge passengers for honest to goodness safe and decent facilities. This would be a viable Public Private Partnership project for the DOTC. Build one at the NLEX — Caloocan — Quezon City boundary and one somewhere in Bicutan — Taguig or Alabang. Only by making this idea a PPP do we stand a chance of building the project free of graft and corruption.

By the way, so many properties and buildings are becoming empty at the Guadalupe area. Why not expropriate the entire area and build an off-EDSA bus terminal similar to what SM-Mega Mall has done. Roxas can even talk to the Gokongweis to do the same for their malls. That alone would help so much in reducing the traffic along EDSA.

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When I returned from Bangkok last week, I was SURPRISED to hear the Secretary of Energy and the DILG Secretary giving informative and in-depth interviews on radio.

I was surprised to hear the “illusive” Secretary Rene Almendras because in the past he rarely gives live interviews, but there he was actually giving an instant course on the energy situation. After listening to Secretary Almendras, I could not help but wonder why he let his critics beat him up on radio in the past considering he has a very good grasp of the subject matter. One of the best things that Almendras did during that interview was to spell out the actual price of fuel at the pump in several countries in the region. That bit of information certainly sobers up a lot of people.

In the case of Secretary Jesse Robredo, he has been relatively visible but what made his pre Holy Week interview was that it happened alongside Secretary Almendras. It was as if cabinet members were suddenly allowed if not encouraged to engage media and communicate with the public.

This development is certainly most welcome because the public want and expect to hear from cabinet members directly and not designated spokespersons. I have nothing against the Communications group, but I personally have the impression that all announcements and clarifications have been centralized, sanitized and as a result, now comes across as cold, indifferent and more like propaganda than useful information.

When we compare between a spokesperson and a cabinet member or director, it is immediately clear that a spokesperson is a dead end providing very limited information. But when a cabinet member or director speaks on an issue, not only do they do so authoritatively, they also have the discretion or power to take on certain problems and act on them.

Malacañang and the President certainly need the indispensable assistance of the Communications group who have been branded as “loyal only to the President”, but there comes a time when only the persons in charge should do the talking. In the case of secretary Almendras, congratulations for facing the music and “dancing” so well.

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