Sunday March 20’s second presidential debate was like a Plaza Miranda verbal tussle of the old days—a no-holds barred, insult- and sarcasm-laden talkathon on nationwide radio and television. The three-hour debate focused on the character of the candidates, competence, and corruption.
Vice President Jejomar Binay, once the undisputed frontrunner (Grace Poe and Rodrigo Duterte are now, with a quarter of the votes each), received most of the unfettered mudslinging and personal attacks which centered mostly on alleged corruption during his family’s 29-year ascendancy holding the mayorship of Makati, the Philippines’ premier business and upscale residential district.
Binay brought along documents that would have proven his innocence or presumption of his innocence, before a final ruling by a competent court, the anti-graft court Sandiganbayan. But Comelec’s rules did not allow him to bring notes and documents to the debate.
Binay had explained, lamely, that he wanted to present a waiver on his bank accounts, challenging close rival Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte to sign the same document. Duterte agreed but the two were prevented by debate moderator Luchi Cruz-Valdez of TV5 to do the ceremonial signing.
The beleaguered Binay promised to sign a Freedom of Information executive order as soon as he takes office as president. “Trust me. I am a man of action,” he assured.
Binay then jabbed at Grace Poe, the frontrunner candidate in both the Pulse Asia and Social Weather Stations polls in March. “You are not a true Filipino!” Binay blasted Poe. “You pledged allegiance to America. You abjured your Filipino citizenship. You are ashamed of where you came from.”
Eyes blazing, Poe counterpunched. “What’s the difference [in staying in the Philippines] if you stole money anyway?”
“You sound like I have been convicted of stealing,” Binay snapped back. “I was not exactly referring to you,” Poe retorted.
The senator added that Binay’s making it appear as a crime for a Filipino going abroad is like accusing some 10 million overseas Filipino workers of disloyalty to their country. “More than 10 million Filipinos live abroad. They have dual citizenship,” she argued. “It’s better to leave and work honorably abroad than stay here in the Philippines and keep on stealing,” she added.
Binay accused the Liberal Party’s Mar Roxas of inaction and paralysis by analysis. He said the former MRT3 general manager Al Vitangcol had implicated Roxas of complicity in the corruption-tainted maintenance contract for the 16-kilometer elevated train line on Edsa. Roxas denied the allegations.
Binay likened Roxas to the dreaded Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels who once said if you told a lie big enough and kept repeating it, people would eventually come to believe it. He accused Mar of leading the demolition job against the vice president.
Roxas came under vicious attack from his rivals for the incompetence and corruption in the two departments he headed under President Aquino III—the Department of Transportation and Communications, and the Department of Interior and Local Government. His men kept running the DoTC despite its being handed over to former Congressman Joseph Emilio Aguinaldo Abaya who by now will go down in history as the most incompetent and corrupt DoTC secretary ever.
The DoTC failure is epitomized by almost daily breakdowns in the train service of the MRT-3 and the long queues commuters endure daily so that one commute takes three hours, one way. The breakdowns have been traced to a virtual lack of maintenance, which absence was traced to corruption, and which corruption was traced to a cabal of Roxas and Liberal Party partisans grabbing lucrative renewable maintenance contracts without public bidding.
The DILG failure is epitomized by the rising incidence of crime in the country and by the growing menace of drugs. Even when drug lords are sent to the national penitentiary, they continue their pernicious racket by converting the penitentiary into one huge drugs laboratory, and in crime-fighter Mayor Rodrigo Duterte’s words, “to cook shabu.”
To those charges, Roxas clarified that the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency “is not under the DILG. It’s under the Office of the President.” But that was like passing the blame on the drugs menace to Aquino III.
“You are a fraud, a pretender,” Duterte kept on pummeling Roxas. “If you don’t know how to kill and are afraid to die, you cannot be president.” To which Mar Roxas replied: “You cannot kill people without due process.”
“You are like a moron who doesn’t know what to do,” he told Roxas, accusing him of incompetence. Binay chimed in: “Mar Roxas doesn’t know anything about local government.”
Roxas recited his achievements. Crime incidents, he said, were reduced from 919 daily to 253 daily (that was because the police were told to blotter only notable crimes, not the petty ones like phone snatchings). About 4.5-million families enjoy the Pantawid Pamilya anti-poverty cash doleout program.
To which Poe replied, “25-million Filipinos are poor and 15 million are hungry.”
Roxas went back to Binay. Citing Commission on Audit figures, he said in Makati during Binay’s time, a P220-million parking building eventually cost 10 times, at P2 billion. Hospital beds should cost only P34,000 but were procured at P500,000 each. Sterilizers that go for P16,000 apiece cost P1.5 million at the city-run Ospital ng Makati.
In his closing remarks, Binay accused his rivals of mendicancy and ignorance, of talk and no action, of promises instead of performance.
The vice president recited what he did in Makati. From P240 million in bankruptcy to P11 billion in revenues, assistance to the poor, and basic services rendered.
Duterte promised to stop corruption. “If you cannot stop corruption, you cannot stop criminality,” he said. He said 30 percent of the national budget is eaten up by corruption, money that could have been used to alleviate the plight of the poor.
He promised to stop criminality and corruption in three to six months but failed to say how he would do it. “I have to provide security for the next generation,” he vowed. “We need to provide leadership, not just a platform.”
Poe stressed she is from the Visayas, being a foundling from Iloilo. She bewailed that 25-million Filipinos earn P330 a year per capita and that 15 million are hungry.
She said she will expand the national penitentiary to accommodate prisoners convicted of corruption. She will appoint the bemedalled Marine Colonel Ariel Querubin as her anti-crime czar to go after drug lords and criminal syndicates. “I can do it,” she assured, rebutting criticisms of incompetence and inexperience by the candidate whose only stint in government was being chair of the government movie and television censors board from 2010 to 2012 before her being elected as the No. 1 senator in 2013.
Mar Roxas decried the loss of decency and vowed to bring it back. Whatever decency meant he did not define. He bewailed one must be a “sipsip” (lick ass) and make “singit” (jump the line) or “kabit” (be a hanger-on) to succeed.