I WATCHED the Commission on Appointments hearing of Environment and Natural Resources Secretary Gina Lopez yesterday.
Santa Banana, from what I heard on the questions asked of the Lopez clan heiress, she has really become the elephant in the room—as taipan Manny Pangilinan had once described her. She is indeed going all-out to make the mining industry an endangered species.
This is why I have been wondering why President Duterte keeps on reappointing her, considering what she has done against the mining workers and the poor. And she says her heart bleeds for them.
Let’s enumerate the reasons why Lopez must not only bypassed, and which would means that the President can no longer reappoint her.
First, she suspended some 28 mining firms despite the recommendations of her own audit team just to impose fines on the mining firms concerned, and to warn them that their permits to operate would be revoked for repeated violation of mining laws.
The aftermath of her unilateral act led to her picking a fight with Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea. Did she not realize that as executive secretary, all appeals to the President for reconsideration of her acts have to pass through the ES?
And then, Lopez even wanted the New People’s Army to help her in her fight against the mining industry. Isn’t that enough reason why the President should just make her resign? The NPA is an enemy of the state.
Now, Lopez is at it again with the creation of a P9.4-billion backyard industry for charcoal making that would exclusively benefit the private company Biochar, which is owned by her trusted Undersecretary Philip Carmen. My gulay, if that is not graft and corruption, I don’t know what is!
And didn’t Lopez even work for her French friend’s permit from the Department of Energy? For that she and her entourage got an all-expenses paid trip to Paris.
In fact, it was the person who arranged her trip who charged her with graft and corruption before the Ombudsman. I cannot understand why she would do such a thing. Isn’t she affluent?
Come to think of it, at the rate President Duterte is lambasting the Lopez-owned ABS-CBN for biased reportage, shouldn’t Lopez just resign if she has any self-respect left?
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The many raids by the New People’s Army on businesses all over the country, and the burning of transport buses for not paying “revolutionary taxes,” can only validate what I have been asking President Duterte. Why does he still trust these communists?
My gulay, the very fact that the NPAs raided some establishments right in Davao City, the President’s turf, was meant to embarrass Mr. Duterte and show the world they are still a force to reckon with. Hence, they seem to say, the President should submit to their demands!
The National Democratic Front and the Communist Party of the Philippines are demanding so many things from the government. This in itself is a message they are sending.
It’s all about sincerity and trust!
Mr. Duterte should know by now that the communists cannot be trusted at all. They are duplicitous.
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President Duterte’s bland Asean statement at the end of the Asian Summit is understandable. That’s what I said in an earlier column when he failed to take the opportunity, as Asean chairman, to include in that statement the fact that the Philippines won an arbitral ruling against China over the South China Sea dispute.
I said that the arbitral ruling against China’s incursion into the South China Sea would not be respected anyway by China, and would only create tension over the SCS dispute with members of Asean.
But while I could understand the hesitation of President Duterte to create tension with China, he should not go overboard in accommodating it, either. He needs to show the world that the country still maintains an independent foreign policy.
It should be enough that President isn’t rocking the boat over the SCS dispute.
The Chinese may be providing us with investments and trade. But this does not mean we should be its vassal.
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President Duterte should now think twice, or even thrice about his boy, PNP chief Ronald dela Rosa. Is Dela Rosa really good for the administration, and the fight against illegal drugs?
Dela Rosa sometimes acts like a comedian!
His latest gambit was trying to defend the secret cell in a police station in Tondo. The cell was discovered by the Commission on Human Rights.
The matter should be investigated. Are there more secret cells we should know about?