That EDSA extravaganza in Cebu

Finally, Cebuanos has been (although belatedly) given an official recognition of Cebu’s role during the EDSA Revolt of 1986, which no less than President Benigno “P-Noy” Aquino III declared during his short speech before the Cebu Provincial Capitol during the 28th anniversary of the EDSA People Power Revolt. Few people knew that opposition stalwarts like former Rep. Tony Cuenco and the late Inday Nita Daluz marched on the streets of Cebu City against martial rule and were jailed for those street protests.

This happened long before the people of Manila realized that Martial Law wasn’t bringing the nation at par with our ASEAN neighbors. When President Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law, countries like Hong Kong, Singapore or Malaysia always looked up to the Philippines. Fourteen years later, the Philippines were dubbed “The Sick Man of Asia.”

But 28 years after the EDSA revolt, people no longer joined those once tumultuous celebrations at the EDSA Shrine. The reason of course is Filipinos’ disillusionment because the promises of the EDSA revolt have not resulted to better governance of the nation. As we’ve written so many times already, “We got rid of Ali Baba, but allowed the 40 thieves to remain and in the end, they hijacked the People Power revolution and became the political elite today that has ruled longer than the Marcoses for 28 years!

To top it all, since P-Noy took the reins of power in Malacañang in 2010, we have seen the worse in the political elite led no less by P-Noy himself who engineered the removal of Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona using the newly-discovered Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) as his tool to “entice” the Senators to vote the Chief Justice out of the bench. We are sure the same thing was done for the passage of the Reproductive Health (RH) bill, which was vehemently opposed by the Catholic Church. Corruption had only worsened!

Suddenly the Senate went from the frying pan into the fire when the Janet Lim Napoles Pork Scam was exposed and top Senators, EDSA stalwart Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile and Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, Sen. Bong Revilla as the major players. But lest you have already forgotten, P-Noy cannot detach himself from the Napoles issue because she surrendered to him in Malacañang and he literally took care of her…, which raised the eyebrows of many Filipinos who asked, “In return for what?” A quid pro quo?

With the President’s sagging image worsened by the Aquino regime’s snail paced reaction to help the victims of Typhoon Yolanda and the lies perpetrated by the Social Weather Station (SWS) that the strongest typhoon on the planet did not dent the popularity of P-Noy… things started to nose-dive especially when the Special Administrative Region (SAR) of Hong Kong demanded visas for Philippine government officials and the Chinese Government’s continued bullying of the Philippines, this time firing water cannons against our poor fishermen in Scarborough Shoal.

Hey we nearly forgot to mention that with the blessings of P-Noy Aquino, Comelec Commissioner Sixto Brillantes helped engineer the infamous Precinct Count Optical Scan (PCOS) to spit out a 60%-30%-10% results in the 2013 elections which Ateneo IT Prof. Alex Muga discovered. But today no investigation on this has reached the Office of the Ombudsman.

With Malacañang on damage control mode, spin doctors had to do something to buoy the morale of the Aquino presidency and voila… go to Cebu and make an EDSA extravaganza out of the 28th anniversary of the EDSA Revolt. We wrote in detail what happened in Cebu 28 years ago. But surprisingly, in his speech even Cebu Governor Hilario Davide III failed to give his captive audience a little bit of Cebu EDSA history. I guess that’s because he was too young to be in Fuente Osmeña in those historic days.

A few minutes into his speech, P-Noy decided not to use his prepared speech that he could see in the teleprompter and spoke from the heart. P-Noy explained why Cebu is important to him saying, “In September 1983 I came to Cebu and it was as if there was no Martial Law…as if Cebu was already free because of Cebu’s opposition to the Marcos dictatorship.” The President also admitted that the spirit of EDSA started in Cebu and his mother Cory came to Cebu to start the civil disobedience campaign in Cebu. Honestly, I expected P-Noy to give Cebuanos the infrastructure development that he has denied Cebu in the last 3 years. But we got nothing!

But despite the holding of the 28th anniversary of EDSA, Cebu still got nothing from the President. Incidentally the Province of Cebu had nothing to do with the preparations for the EDSA celebration, as it was the work of the EDSA Commission. All speeches were in the Tagalog language, except for Gov. Davide who spoke in English. But P-Noy’s visit to Cebu only brought an EDSA style traffic jam that Cebuanos never saw in the last 28 years. Now how much did that EDSA extravaganza cost us taxpayers?

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