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All lies were what President Gloria Arroyo said in
her State of the Nation Address, former President Joseph “Erap”
Estrada said.
Estrada justified his decision
not to attend the joint session of Congress for President Arroyo’s
eighth SONA despite having received a formal invitation from his
former colleagues in the Senate.
“There’s nothing to expect
from her SONA, because all we will hear from her are lies,” he
said.
Estrada added that he already had
an idea of what Mrs. Arroyo would be saying.
“I knew what she’s going to
say. A lot of people don’t believe what she’s saying anyway,”
he said.
Estrada added that he sees no
point in listening to the SONA, noting that whatever President
Arroyo will say in her speech will be insufficient to clear her
administration’s name.
He said it is “impossible”
for the President to make it up to Filipinos, given that she only
has two years left before finally bowing out of office.
”My God. She’s been the
president for almost eight years but she’s done nothing. How can
she make up with only more than a year left in office?” Estrada
asked. She pardoned him after he was convicted of plunder in 2007.
The former President said he did
not deliver a counter-SONA that was his usual practice when he was
jailed because anti-Arroyo groups are already delivering their
assessments of the current state of the people.
“I am glad that after seven
years, the truth was unveiled to our people. They now see what is
really happening in the country,” he added.
Estrada said it usually took him
two weeks to prepare for his own SONA when he was still the
president. He was removed from office in a bloodless revolt in 2001
and was replaced by Mrs. Arroyo, his vice president.
He added that unlike the
incumbent, he made sure that his speech spoke only the truth, and
that the promises he gave were attainable.
He added that despite the crises
the country is facing, the people should not lose hope and should
not resort to violence.
“As I always say, ‘Hungry
stomach knows no law’ . . . I am one with the people in their
desire for change, but I want to remind them to stay calm and to
avoid violence,” Estrada said. He cited a Social Weather Stations
survey, which said 2.9 million Filipinos are experiencing
involuntary hunger in the last three months.
Vice President Noli de Castro
said it is not Mrs. Arroyo’s job alone to make life better for
Filipinos.
“We should not stop at
criticizing the government. We should help find solutions. We should
be part of the solution,” he added.
For now, the Vice President said,
the “power and resources of the government must be devoted to
social services in order that our countrymen will be directly
benefited.”
Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago
agreed.
She said the President has only
two more years to go, and she is trying to build a legacy.
Mrs. Arroyo is “entitled to the
presumption that official duty has been regularly performed,”
Santiago added.
“If she hasn’t, let’s hear
some alternative solutions, not empty calls for destruction. People
are fed up with the nattering nabobs of negativism,” she said.
Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano is
unconvinced.
“The SONA has become one big
propaganda of the President,” he said. According to him, Mrs.
Arroyo has not been accounting for all the promises she had made in
her previous addresses to the nation.
Mrs. Arroyo’s supposed concern
for the poor did not fly with Sen. Pia Cayetano.
“The short-term relief promised
by the President’s National Social Welfare Program amount to
fly-by-night subsidies that are shallow, of low impact and
unsustainable. [The program] is but the instutionalization of the
government’s doleout system to a limited number of people, not
necessarily the poorest of the poor,” Cayetano said.
Had Mrs. Arroyo scrapped the
sales tax on oil, Sen. Francis Escudero said he would have given her
a “passing mark” for her eighth SONA.
“I maintain that we could do
without the value-added tax [on oil] if we want to lessen the burden
of Filipinos,” he added.
Even before the President
presented her report to the nation, Mayor Jejomar Binay of Makati
City had decided that poverty is still the true state of the
country, despite the government’s attempts to address the issue.
During a press conference hours
before the SONA, the mayor, also the head of the United Opposition,
said the government has failed to meet its “self-declared” goals
given the poverty the country is facing today.
Binay ticked off government
statistics to back up his claims on rising inflation and
unemployment.
He said, though, that the
President could still “redeem” herself in her remaining two
years in office. Binay did not say how.
Palawan Rep. Antonio Alvarez said
Mrs. Arroyo already is doing it.
“Mamma mia, great speech, a
feel-good speech,” he described the Presidents’s Sona. “She
laid out the road ahead and, if we will follow it, it will lead us
to the light at the end of the tunnel,” Alvarez added.
House Minority Leader Ronaldo
Zamora disagreed: “Her grade for me is a failure.”
--Francis Earl A. Cueto, Efren L. Danao, Marian J. Benetua,
Llanesca Panti And
Sammy Martin
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