The polling firm Social Weather Stations said 72 percent of Filipinos expected a happy Christmas. Whether they experienced it or not, Christmas is over and many were left homeless and without food when typhoons Nona and Onyok delivered a 1-2 punch even as the year was ending.
The year ahead is one more fraught with expectations. We are going to have a national election and a change of political leadership. Can we really look ahead to better times or should we expect more of the same misery—corruption, crime, choking traffic in the metropolis made worse by a badly run public transport system?
Comes now the news that Transportation Secretary Jun Abaya has awarded without public bidding a P3.8-billion contract to a Korean firm for the service maintenance of the Metro Rail Transit. The reason for the anomalous award? It was an emergency. Yeah, right, an emergency in the making for five years under Abaya’s watch
If traffic is not moving, the runaway crime rate is. The daily news is full of drug trafficking and ambush killings committed by riding-in-tandem gunmen has given rise to a public clamor for a new town sheriff who does not take prisoners.
National security is faced with challenges on three fronts from the MILF-BIFF-ASG Islamic groups, the communist NPA guerrillas and China’s aggression in the West Philippine Sea
The National Economic and Development Authority foresees the 6.2-percent growth in the gross domestic product to continue on to 2016 and the next administration. Let’s hope this trend in the economic growth will filter down to the masses.
Will the job market improve? Political candidates promise to end the illegal contractualization of workers. This is the campaign season when politicians make so many promises but do not fulfill them. Take PNoy, for example, he promised to pass the Freedom of Information bill but reneged on it once he was elected president.
Still, there was much to be thankful for. We have been spared (so far) from the Islamist State scourge although IS presence has been detected in Mindanao. Paris, France and San Bernardino in the US west coast suffered the most casualties from terrorist attacks.
The judicial system is still working as seen in the legal process independent presidential candidate Grace Poe and Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte are going through.
If Poe is disqualified after the Commission on Elections en banc affirmed the ruling of its two legal divisions, the senator’s chances to stay on the ballot now rests with the 15 magistrates of the Supreme Court where she has elevated her case. Three of those justices sitting in the Senate Electoral Tribunal have already ruled Poe is not a natural-born citizen, and therefore not qualified under the Constitution. A fatal mistake in Poe’s case is that she continued to use her American passport during back-and-forth trips to the US and the Philippines contrary to renouncement of American citizenship.
Still, 12 of those Supreme Court justices could have different legal opinions and some just might rule in favor of Poe. The law, it is said, has as many interpretations as there are as many lawyers interpreting it.
At this point, it’s still a four-way race among Poe, Binay, Roxas and Duterte. But don’t be surprised if it become a mano-a-mano rematch just between Roxas and Binay considering the SC decision on Poe and the Comelec ruling on whether Duterte’s CoC will be given due course.
Poe is tied with Binay in the latest SWS survey with 26 percent followed by Roxas at third with 22 percent. Duterte is fourth at 19 percent, his rating adversely affected by his blasphemous outburst against the beloved Pope Francis.
In the recent Pulse Asia survey, Binay regained the top spot as voters’ preferred presidential candidate with 33 percent. The surprising Pulse Asia survey, according to its own analysts, can be attributed to the legal issues facing previous leader Poe plus the Duterte-Roxas word war. Under this headline-grabbing scenario, the corruption issues against Binay were temporarily out of the public consciousness. This, plus Binay’s core constituency which he continues to plumb by pressing flesh and eating with them bare hands.. Call it tawdry and tradpol, but Binay gains political mileage for identifying himself with the common folk.
Overall, it was a year of defeat and triumph. The Philippines scored an initial victory in The Hague international arbitration court which ruled it has jurisdiction in the case filed by Manila against China’s sovereignty claim in the West Philippine Sea. Manny Pacquiao lost to Floyd Mayweather in their much- awaited fight of the century in May. Miss Philippines, Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach, made up for it by winning the Miss Universe beauty crown this December also in Las Vegas to end the year on a high note for Filipinos.