Today, Noynoy Aquino will deliver his last state of the nation address. Inside the venue, it will all be glitz and glamor. Outside, where the reality is more hardcore, a security cordon of tens of thousands of battle-ready troops and riot policemen and barricades of barbed wire, concrete slabs and container vans will try to protect the country's most popular president from the people he used to fondly call his bosses.
What Noynoy will say in his sixth and last SONA can be validated by what people will determine for themselves in actual experiences. That the state would now require extraordinary measures to protect the president this one final time shows the extent to which the SONA has fallen from the credulity once attached to its name. Today it is just one more useless and expensive charade.
The rhetoric of Noynoy has always been full of bombast, often directed at scapegoats culled from previous administrations in ill-concealed attempts to hide the emptiness of his own slow and often meandering progress. This SONA will not be any different. It will be made up of claims unsupported by facts. It will probably be in Tagalog again, to smooth over the discomforts of lying.
As he is taken to the speaking venue, he will probably stop no more at red lights as he was wont to do. Those "no wang-wang" days are over. They were after all just for show. This time, he cannot risk getting held up in hostile traffic. He will have to be whisked through, sirens wailing like crazy, through the straightest and shortest path out of harm's way.
Yet, two days before, on Saturday, Noynoy inaugurated a four-lane four-kilometer-long toll road called the Muntinglupa-Cavite Expressway or MCX. He personally drove his own Toyota Land Cruiser through the new highway as if to express his unbridled glee. He had every reason to be happy. That much I am willing to concede. MCX is, after all, his first ever completed public-private partnership project.
It is a real accomplishment. It is his first ever PPP. If he uses up his entire SONA detailing it, I will not be surprised. That is why he had to drive through it, to get an idea of what reality feels like. His entire six years in office is in that one four-lane four-kilometer PPP-funded road. You would drive too if you were Noynoy. To give you an idea of how long four kilometers is, it is roughly the distance from the Cebu Capitol to Plaza Independencia.
That is why they had to rush the completion of this one PPP road -- to allow Noynoy a sense of what it is to tell the truth. And what a truth he can now tell.
I can just imagine the kind of effort that went into this one particular PPP project to complete it on time for the SONA, with time even to spare for Noynoy to drive through. And they did it. In nearly six years, they finally finished building a four-lane, four-kilometer concrete road. Congratulations.
Noynoy had to have this road to anchor his achievement. It is symbolic. After all, his leadership is all about a road -- the straight and narrow path, it is called. Along this path, no one may tread except the honest and the upright. No one who is crooked and corrupt is allowed to pass. This is the road what was to take the nation to the promised land -- "ang lupa na kung walang kurap, walang mahirap."
How auspicious that only one four-kilometer PPP road was built in all his nearly six years in office. It encapsulates the entire success of an administration that had squandered its entire political capital. From what a nation invested in 2010, you will know what the return is if you only have one PPP road finished in six years.
Daang matuwid, what a beautiful bride she used to be. Now she is old, emaciated, wasted, abused, neglected. Not even the most persuasive re-courtship in a hundred repetitive SONAs can bring back the freshness and the life with which she radiated down the aisle -- the daang matuwid kung saan namulat and pinakamaliit na pangarap ni Juan.
The SONA of Noynoy today will be the final act of betrayal by a leader who failed his nation, not in the many acts of corruption that he sees in his political enemies, but in the few things that mattered -- in his failure to be decisive, in his failure to humble himself, in his failure to be protector of his people instead of his friends, and lastly in his failure to use criticisms to his advantage.