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Friday, March 29, 2024

Exhibit A

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Maybe people have forgotten all about President Rodrigo Duterte’s promise to rid the government of corruption. Well, the President just made an example of an official who is perceived to be very close to him, perhaps simply to remind them of just how serious he is.

Peter Tiu Laviña, the campaign spokesman of Duterte who was also once a Davao City councilor, has been fired as administrator of the National Irrigation Authority. Duterte was supposed to have removed Laviña for demanding commissions from private contractors doing business with the agency he heads.

Laviña himself has denied engaging in corruption, saying that he quit to spare the President from embarrassment. He promised to continue supporting Duterte even outside of government.

I don’t know if Duterte will have any more use for Laviña, now that he has made him Exhibit A of his anti-corruption campaign. All I know is, the people who want to use their closeness to Duterte for personal gain will now think twice before doing so.

Perhaps Duterte thought that he needed to fire Laviña because people remained unconvinced that he was against corruption when he dismissed two associate commissioners of the Bureau of Immigration who were his fraternity brothers, after they had gotten involved in an extortion scandal. Al Argosino and Michael Robles, after all, had no direct links to the President, even if they were Lex Talionis members like Duterte.

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But Laviña is no stranger to Duterte. Firing him must have been a little more difficult for the President, even if he really had no choice in the matter, given all his tough talk against corruption.

I’m sure that it crossed Duterte’s lawyer’s mind that it would be unfair to judge Laviña right away without according him a proper trial. But he understood that he had to send a clear message that he would not allow “even a whiff of corruption,” as he said, to taint his administration—which was why he had to let his former spokesman go.

But it’s truly refreshing to have a President who believes friendship is less important than sending a message about fighting corruption. Especially since we had just come from an administration that never removed anyone from a government post simply because the president then had absolute faith in all of the people he appointed.

Think of it: If Noynoy Aquino had only let go of his elementary school, firing range and Congress smoking-area buddies when they had gotten into trouble, maybe a lot more people had believed that he was truly as pure as the driven snow. But Aquino always protected his people no matter what, because he believed that they could do no wrong.

To the officials of the Duterte administration, the firing of Laviña should make them understand that corruption will be dealt with very harshly. And that the promised campaign against corrupt officials—like the earlier vows to go after illegal drug syndicates and criminality—just got real.

* * *

Manolo Quezon’s latest explainer ran under the headline “President Duterte’s honeymoon may be ending” in the Washington Post. In the article, Quezon described the pro-Duterte rally at Manila’s Rizal Park last Saturday and came to the conclusion that the president’s appeal may be waning because of the sparse crowd that attended it.

“Despite his best efforts, Duterte suddenly finds himself facing a sobering reality,” Quezon wrote. “The critics aren’t going away, and his supporters aren’t as easily mobilized as he had hoped.”

It was a wonderfully written piece of selective observation. After all, as Quezon conveniently failed to point out, the Luneta rally was just a hastily called response to the much better organized (but definitely more attendance-challenged) Yellow mass action on the corner of Edsa and White Plains Avenue.

In a sense, Quezon’s article was just like its introduction, which described him as a journalist with both a television show and a newspaper column. It only told half of the story instead of giving the complete picture, like even the most recently hired reporter is always ordered to come up with.

If you had only read Quezon’s article and never heard of why the Luneta rally was staged, you would not know that the Edsa gathering was even more of a disaster for the pro-Aquino crowd. In fact, by substituting “Aquino” for “Duterte” in the passage I quoted and dividing the crowd in attendance by at least a factor of 10, you could use the same words to accurately describe the pitiful Yellow gathering on that day.

But I’m really glad that Quezon seems to be making a lot of headway in his career as a publicist and a partner of that new “strategic communications” outfit called DDI. His WaPo story was, in large part, a defense of Leila de Lima as much as it was about the Luneta rally—and the anti-Duterte US paper just swallowed the half-explainer that it would never allow its own journalists to write.

Oh, and Quezon describing himself as a TV journalist and a newspaper columnist is just like saying the same thing about Martin Andanar, if Quezon ever was a real journalist, which Andanar once was. But Quezon is really just half a journalist—the Yellow half—and a full-time publicist for the pro-Aquino crowd.

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