The 10th Aboitiz Future Leaders biz summit

Today is the 10th edition of the Aboitiz Future Leaders Business Summit. Wow! How time flies indeed. It’s been 10 long years since we joined the 1st Aboitiz Future Leaders Summit. Back then the Aboitiz Group of Companies got only the best and the brightest minds in the universities and colleges of Cebu. But this has been expanded to include students from the Visayas and Mindanao. Now there are 90 college students from all over the country basking in this very important and unforgettable event in their lives as students, where they are able to sit down and mingle with the top Chief Executive Officers of the Aboitiz Group of Companies.

If the Aboitiz Group of Companies has grown by leaps and bounds in all these years, it is also due to programs like the Aboitiz Future Leaders Business Summit where the best and the brightest students are given this rare opportunity to come close to the business executives of Aboitiz Corp. In a sort of way, the Aboitiz execs themselves are able to pick the minds of these brilliant youth who truly represent the future business leaders of tomorrow.

What makes the 10th edition of the Aboitiz Future Leaders Business Summit important is that, it is not just all conferences and meetings with CEOs. Tomorrow they drive up to Barangay Cansumoroy, Balamban for the Kool Adventure CAMP where they would get a taste of the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation’s  Professional Development Program that helps develop responsible leaders for the future of our country. Kudos to the Aboitiz Group of Companies for this continuing program that helps develop our youth to be responsible and better leaders for the betterment of our nation.

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Finally the Commission on Human Rights has disclosed the truth behind the killings of the “Lumads” or the Indigenous People’s in Mindanao… that the Armed Forces of the Philippines  and the New People’s Army recruit and use “Lumads” as their respective eyes and ears and in the end, many of them get killed in the process.

A few days ago, these Lumads went to Mendiola to protest the so-called “militarization” of some areas in Mindanao. But then, let’s ask, why are these areas being militarized? The answer is simple… it is these areas where the New People’s Army is very active. Many areas especially in Surigao del Sur are heavily infested by the NPA because there are mining operations in the mountain fastness of Mindanao and whenever there are mining operations, there is revolutionary taxation imposed by the NPA. Of course we know that it is a fancy name for plain and simple extortion or worse… armed robbery.

But as usual, the Armed Forces of the Philippines  always fails miserably against the propaganda of the Communist Party of the Philippines. When that mayor and his son were mysteriously killed, the Lumads blamed paramilitary groups. Today we learned that there is a United Nations Delegation that will investigate the killings in this part of Mindanao.

I hope that the UN investigators would open their eyes to the realities that in the Philippines we still have a Communist insurgency, which today the AFP has not checked! Let me say it hear loud and clear… if the NPA did not operate in that part of Mindanao, there would be no paramilitary groups roaming in the mountains of Surigao. Mind you, the presence of the NPA’s in many parts of Mindanao is the principal reason why I strongly do not believe that the Bangsamoro Basic Law  would bring peace to Mindanao.

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This Sunday Nov. 8, 2015 will be the second anniversary of the biggest storm that hit planet earth dubbed “Haiyan” or super typhoon “Yolanda”. This is one natural disaster that exposed the incompetence of the Aquino Regime to the international newsmakers. I will never forget that the first act of PNoy when he went to devastated Tacloban City was to fire Senior Supt. Elmer Soria for telling the media that as many as 10,000 lives could have been lost due to the typhoon. PNoy frowned on this report and immediately fired Supt. Soria.

Then who could forget that poignant meeting with DILG Sec. Manuel “Mar” Roxas and Mayor Alfred Romualdez, which was recorded and went viral in the social media networks when Roxas said, “You are a Romualdez and PNoy is an Aquino.”  This was totally uncalled for. But the effects of this natural disaster still affects the country especially after the Commission on Audit exposed to the public that at least P15 billion of the funds sent by foreign governments or world relief agencies have remained in our banks…unspent.

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