FORMER President now Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her sister ex-Pampanga Vice-Governor Cielo Macapagal-Salgado on Friday led the unveiling of a statue of their father, the late President Diosdado Macapagal.
The ceremony was held at the Philippine Merchant Marine Academy (PMMA) in San Narciso, Zambales.
In a statement, Arroyo said the PMMA built the monument to honor her father who in 1963 signed the law converting the Philippine Nautical School to the Philippine Merchant Marine Academy, thus enabling it to confer the degree of Bachelor of Science in Marine Transportation and automatically grant the Third Mate and Fourth Marine Engineer licenses without undergoing Professional Regulation Commission examinations.
In her brief remarks, Arroyo recalled that when she was president in 2002, the PMMA was already producing 10 percent of the total number of Filipino deck and engine officers manning international ships, thus providing a “bountiful harvest of foreign exchange earnings for the country.”
She said overseas Filipino workers’ remittances, along with the fiscal economic reforms implemented in her term, enabled the country to achieve 38 uninterrupted quarters of successive growth and save the country from the major global recession that happened in 2008.
Similarly, international ratings agencies credit Arroyo’s fiscal and economic reforms for raising the credit worthiness of the Philippines which has been enjoyed during the watch of her successors. Maricel Cruz