You may or may not agree with me, but let me state it still. As far as I’m concerned, this penultimate State of the Nation Address (SONA) of President Benigno “Noy” Aquino III was the best yet he delivered since assuming office. The fifth SONA of President Aquino set the signal to his allies in the 16th Congress and the rest of his supporters, and critics perhaps included, that he is ready to move on as a statesman.
For once, President Aquino merely made broadsides of the mistakes and sins of the past administrations before him. There was no more single-minded bashing specifically of his immediate predecessor, former President and now Pampanga Congresswoman Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. The time for blaming her administration is over, or so it seems.
The Palace insisted yesterday that part of the SONA when President Aquino suddenly turned emotional was a “spontaneous” one and not scripted.
P-Noy showed his heart out when he mentioned about the lessons and wisdom in life he learned from his late parents, slain former Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. and former President Corazon Aquino. “I cannot turn my back on them and our people,” P-Noy vowed but his voice betrayed him as it cracked.
From his father who was assassinated, he quoted: “The Filipinos are worthy dying for.” From his late mother who succumbed to colon cancer on Aug. 1, 2009, P-Noy quoted: “The Filipinos are worth fighting for.”
It turns out it was not the first time that P-Noy quoted his late mother’s words of wisdom to him. While surfing the Internet yesterday, I came across a post in Yahoo of an article “Are the Philippines worth fighting for?” written by William Pesek for Bloomberg View.
A day after the SONA, Pesek wrote: “When I last met Aquino in February, in that very palace, he made a point of showing me the official presidential portrait of his mother, the late Corazon Aquino. ‘She taught me to remember that the Filipino is worth fighting for,’ he said. I like that he repeated that line in yesterday’s address. Because that’s exactly what he needs to do each day for another two years.”
Pesek went on to say: “These risks are greater than you might think as judicial setbacks, scandals and public discontent suddenly raise doubts about improvements that 12 months ago looked unstoppable. As Aquino delivered his penultimate state-of-the-nation address yesterday, the message ‘I’m no lame duck’ seemed written between the lines in bold text. Trouble is, many in Manila political circles aren’t convinced.”
Pesek is a Bloomberg View columnist based in Tokyo and writes on economics, markets and politics throughout the Asia-Pacific region.
Obviously, the 54-year-old bachelor President tried hard not to break into tears as he mused his less than two years left in office.
Going into last stretch of his term, P-Noy is faced with impeachment cases filed against him over the controversial Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) after it was declared “unconstitutional” by the Supreme Court.
Although the 16th Congress is administration-controlled, the three impeachment cases came at a time when P-Noy’s popularity rating has taken a downward direction.
From where I stand, I think it has dawned on President Aquino he has been the one doing the fighting all this time. For many of the Cabinet secretaries who are his supposed “alter egos,” most of them, if not all, are not there to back him up. Instead of taking the bullets for him, so to speak, they hide behind P-Noy’s protective shield.
And these presidential shoulders are not with steel armors to protect him from the sharp knives, bullets and shrapnels that may come his way. Still running loose in P-Noy’s neck up to now are literally deadly shrapnels.
Digressing from his prepared SONA, P-Noy echoed aloud his mortal thoughts: “It’s hard not to think about these things, considering the people we’ve been going up against. Will there be a day when I go on stage, for work, and – will someone manage to plant a bomb? Will the dark schemes of those who want to bring us back to the wrong way of doing things finally succeed?”
P-Noy went on to remember that fateful day in August 1987 when the bloodiest coup d’etat against the administration of his late mother almost claimed his young life. Noy was caught outside the protective cover of the Presidential Security Group (PSG) when mutinous rebel soldiers launched their dawn attack at the presidential residence on Arlegui Street. Noy, with his two convoys, was ambushed in front of St. Jude Church on J.P. Laurel Street, or just a few meters away from the presidential residence where Mrs. Aquino and his four sisters were.
He reminisced that day when he and then Makati mayor and now Vice President Jejomar Binay were alerted about the brewing military putsch by rebel soldiers led by then colonel and now Sen. Gregorio “Gringo” Honasan.
While P-Noy was walking down memory lane, Binay and the rest of the Aquino Cabinet members were all seated in the gallery as audience. On the other hand, Honasan and the rest of the senators and House members were at the session hall of Batasan.
I also flitted to memory lane as a young reporter assigned at the Palace during the administration of Mrs. Aquino. My editor-in-chief now, Ana Marie Pamintuan, and I were there at the exact spot where the ambush took place. We were supposed to join Mrs. Aquino in an official visit to Pampanga that day. We arrived at the Palace gates at the crack of dawn because the media had to travel by land as advance party.
The street was still fresh with blood when we got there. We would later learn about the ambush and that Noy was wounded while three of his PSG escorts were killed. Doctors who treated him after his near-fatal ambush did not want to remove these foreign objects from his body without risk to Noy.
Despite this near-fatal attack on her son, Mrs. Aquino never showed any signs of weakness. When she appeared on television later that day, a stern-faced Mrs. Aquino issued the ultimatum to rebel soldiers to surrender. During her term, there were at least nine coup attempts against her.
Embracing his late mother’s fatalist view in life, P-Noy impressed upon the Filipino people he would die contented on the thought that there is no more turning back on the reforms he has started. The transformation has begun and P-Noy is moving on.