In the first place, who stole what from whom? And if what’s been stolen is taken from the thief and returned to its rightful owner, is that stealing, too?
In a televised press conference after she resigned from the Duterte Cabinet, Vice President Leni Robredo warned darkly about an alleged plot to steal her remaining position, that of the second-highest post in the land. By framing her resignation in the light of this so-called plot, Robredo sought not only to hide the real reason for her leaving (her refusal to conform to the declared policies and programs of her boss in the Cabinet, President Rodrigo Duterte) but also to incite her supporters against the possibility that she may be dislodged as vice president by the Supreme Court sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal.
In seeking to politicize her resignation, Robredo also attempted to divert attention away from her incompetence as overall housing coordinator. After all, Robredo’s claims of “solid accomplishments” have never really gone beyond attending meetings and conferences and giving speeches, where she would often take the opportunity to criticize the Duterte administration’s policies.
As one joke goes, Senator Leila de Lima has built more houses for her paramours than Robredo ever did for the poor as HUDCC chief. And, at the time, De Lima was actually secretary of justice.
But it’s one thing to use politics to cover up the fact that she was ideologically a bad fit for a Cabinet post and incompetent, to boot. It’s quite another to cast aspersions on the Supreme Court, which is still deliberating on the election protest filed against Robredo by former Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.
The Marcos camp, which has long bewailed the slow pace of the court in ruling on the electoral protest it filed, was understandably irked by Robredo’s insinuations. And the irony of being accused of planning to steal the vice presidency from someone that Marcos has charged with theft in the May elections was not lost on the former senator.
“We have been asking the court to speed up its disposition of the case for the longest time, to no avail, because we worry is that that there may be a deliberate attempt to delay it,” Marcos’ campaign manager Jonathan dela Cruz told me. “To be accused [by Robredo] of stealing her post is laughable, because we believe that she was the one who benefited from wholesale theft of the vote in the last elections.”
The electoral theft in question has to do with Marcos’ overnight loss of his one million-vote lead shortly after the polls closed on May 9. In fact, central to Marcos’ protest is the manipulation of the Smartmatic servers which reversed the trend of the vote showing the former senator comfortably ahead and establishing Robredo as the leader by a slim margin of a little over 200,000, which she maintained until the last votes were counted.
Also, Robredo’s mention of her electoral case in her resignation statement shows her contempt for the PET, which is really the Supreme Court en banc, the body which the 1987 Constitution mandated to resolved protests regarding the election of presidents and vice presidents. Just like the petitioners against the recent burial of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Robredo has heretofore never questioned the jurisdiction of the high court —even if she seems to have no qualms about questioning a ruling that may go against her.
Like her Yellow idol Noynoy Aquino, Robredo can never seem to find any fault in what she’s done and hasn’t done. She can’t understand—or refuses to understand—that she was forced to quit for being a very public critic of a president who gave her a high position in a gesture of inclusiveness and reconciliation and for not doing a good job.
For Robredo, it’s all Bongbong Marcos’ fault, never hers. And that’s just the sort of attitude that costs people their jobs.
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A Palace informant has told me that Duterte has long been complaining about the other official directed to stop attending Cabinet meetings, Commission on Higher Education Chairman Patricia Licuanan. A holdover of the Aquino administration whose term expires in 2018 yet, Licuanan has declared that she will comply with the order that Robredo could not, but will not resign as head of the higher education agency.
According to this source, Duterte has ordered Licuanan to stay away from Cabinet meetings because she seems uninterested in implementing his programs on higher education, such as the President’s call to bring back compulsory military training in schools. Congress, aware that Licuanan is in the doghouse with Duterte, has gleefully slashed CHED’s 2017 budget, to get back at her for being so arrogantly against funding for state universities and colleges during the Aquino years, when she was backed up by then-Budget Secretary Florencio Abad.
But Licuanan will not do a Robredo even if Duterte’s higher education programs suffer, because she believes she is protected by her fixed term of office. “We’ll see about that,” my informant said.
Abangan.
