This article was written early yesterday morning. Events that would make this plea obsolete may have hopefully transpired between the time it was written and the time it sees print.
One front-page news item on Monday was the advice of Senator Antonio Trillanes addressed publicly to Vice President Leni Robredo not to accept the dinner invitation of the president last Saturday, during the graduation ceremonies of the Philippine National Police Academy.
Thus far, the Vice President has not publicly accepted the invitation; neither has she publicly declined.
It is one of those “pour la patrie” opportunities that the Vice President should not miss. She should graciously accept the dinner invitation, a grand gesture on the part of the President, a “bon mot.”
The political air these days has been quite toxic. Toxic for the major players, since both our President and the Vice President are major players in the politics of this country. Worse, it has been toxic for the nation.
A useless impeachment complaint has been filed against the President installed just nine months ago, after winning a stunning electoral mandate. His allies reacted by saying that they shall file an impeachment complaint against the Vice President as well, for embarrassing (shaming may be the more appropriate descriptive) the country before the international community.
The impeachment complaint filed against the president by the party-mate of oppositionist Senator Trillanes will not reach first base in the House of Representatives. But it makes for good theater, clearly a publicity stunt meant to damage, dent perhaps, the President’s local popularity.
The five-minute script mouthed by the vice president on the international stage, whether she knowingly did it without comprehending its impact, or whether she was just “used” by desperate puppeteers, hoped to further damage the international reputation of a president who does not care for such to begin with because he is convinced he is doing what they look upon with opprobrium, justifying his “harsh” methods to “save the country and save the next generation of Filipinos.”
Was the Vice President “used”? Did she, without realizing the negativity of it all, just agree? Or was she part and parcel of an insidious scheme to destabilize? These are matters that she could clear with the President in a private meeting.
Just when the economy is at a critical junction, when focus should be on sustaining the momentum of growth and making the fruits of such growth inclusive in a sea of poverty, the politics of the nation has become more toxic.
Let us not drop the ball on the cusp of greater things coming.
Publicly, the President has declared that the impeachment complaints against him as well as the Vice President ought to be stopped. Never mind the fact that he won by an overwhelming margin over the presidential candidate whom the Vice President supported in the last political exercise. Never mind the fact that she won by a squeaker over her closest political rival. The fact, as he adequately expressed, is that they both had an electoral mandate, and this should be respected.
It was not so much worry about himself, for his numbers in the House of Representatives were legion. The same numbers could easily send the complaint against the Vice President to the Senate for public trial, as the previous president did with adverse enthusiasm against Chief Justice Renato Corona, who died with a broken heart.
The President clearly wants the political air cleansed of the vituperative toxicity which now engages the nation in useless debate.
His adversaries would say the administration started it with the cases filed against Senator Leila de Lima, who is now under detention. Yet everyone knows that the President’s adversaries started plotting from Day One of his administration, squirming against human rights violations which the President always justifies as necessary to save the next generation of Filipinos.
Unable to dent his massive popularity, with public research saying that people feel safer, and that his popularity remains high, his political adversaries and their puppeteers have gone to the international stage instead.
They have gotten the human rights watch organizations to condemn what they insist to be extra-judicial killings leveled “against the poor.” They have gotten a major newspaper to do a hatchet job on the President. They have gotten European parliamentarians to brazenly interfere upon the internal affairs of the nation, “demanding” that our justice system release what they call a “political prisoner” in the person of Leila de Lima, even as evidence has mounted that she, wittingly or unwittingly (that is for our courts to decide) participated in the horrendous drug menace that we grapple against these days. And of course, though he is largely inconsequential as compared to the days when his idol the Cardinal Sin hugely imposed his presence in the political scene, Archbishop Soc Villegas wades in with his corny Edgar and Art fable.
And all these are happening in not-too-coincidental cacophony.
Still and all, President Duterte offers a bon mot, a grand gesture of reconciliation, to his vice president.
It would be “sayang” for her sake and for the nation more so, if she disdains his invitation to dine and talk.
In contemporary history, one recalls how the relationship between President Cory Aquino and Vice President Doy Laurel soured early on in her reign. Unlike Digong and Leni who come from two adversarial political camps, Cory and Doy challenged the giant Marcos together. Doy in fact played the “baptist” to the returning Ninoy who was mercilessly gunned down in the tarmac.
The antecedents of the Cory hostility upon Doy are too many for an article to do justice upon. Maybe some day I shall write about this chapter in our sad history from the vantage point of one who was very close to one of them.
Suffice it to say for the moment that there were mutual friends who tried to mend the personal and political fences, but they did not succeed. Things turned for the worse. And the country gained nothing out of the animosity between the top two leaders. It was, as a diplomat remarked then, “self-destructing.”
I just hope the Vice President sits down with the President and, together with him, clears the political air that divides rather than unites. Pour la patrie.
Otherwise, “sayang.”