I could feel the pain inside him as I watched ousted Department of the Interior and Local Government Secretary Ismael Sueno bid goodbye to his management and staff at DILG yesterday morning.
Sueno’s main worry is his name becoming generic for “corrupt public official”—in the same way “Noynoying” has become generic for “a lazy and do-nothing public official,” or “Abad” rhyming with DAP or one who steals pork-barrel money by the billions.
Sueno was not convincing, though, why the public should not perceive him as corrupt. The imported Austria-made fire truck deal to which he was linked involved a potential overprice of P1 billion or 1,000 million pesos—equivalent to recklessly spending Pl million a day for three years. With such gargantuan amounts, one can easily cross one’s threshold of integrity.
A billion is enough money to secure your financial future, hire lawyers to defend you in court against allegations of graft, and commission PR men to burnish your public image. To be sure, the fire truck contract began with then DILG Secretary Jessie Robredo. It was nurtured by Mar Roxas.
The fire truck deal seems to be a jinx. Robredo drowned in a plane crash. Mar lost disastrously in the last elections to Duterte. And now Sueno is tarred, probably forever, by allegations of graft.
Sueno is a former seminarian. His mother-in-law is 90 years old. His only grandson is two years old, he said. Both are not probably aware of his predicament —a loyal subaltern to Rodrigo Roa Duterte and yet was fired by the President on mere suspicion of corruption. As chairman of the smallish political party PDP-Laban, he headed the nascent movement early last year to convince Rodrigo Duterte to run for president because it was time for someone from Mindanao to be president and the long-time Davao City mayor was just the right man for the job.
Sueno recalled another Duterte loyalist whom the President unceremoniously dismissed, Undersecretary Peter Laviña, also a seminarian, who he had been with the mayor since 1988. Sueno said as boss of National Irrigation Administration, Laviña was too new on the job to come across juicy contracts. In Sueno’s case, he had been a town mayor (Koronadal) and a governor (South Cotabato). So he knew local government management. And the fire truck deal? Two previous DILG chiefs have dipped their fingers into it, since 2011. So it is not as it Sueno concocted the contract to make money. It was, to use a cliché, a low-lying fruit.
After what happened to Sueno, Laviña and to a certain extent Perfecto Yasay, formerly of foreign affairs, it will be difficult for Duterte to recruit top talents for cabinet or sub-cabinet jobs. Who wants a job that gets paid only P90,000 a month (gross), oversees hundreds of thousands of people, involves long and unusual working hours, and is subject to all kinds of blandishments?
I hope that Duterte, some day, from the goodness of his heart, will pluck these people from the depths of ignominy and give them chance at redemption.
That was exactly Sueno’s theme yesterday in his valedictory at the DILG. He called himself a “sacrificial lamb.” At the altar of public service? He likened himself to Jesus Christ. In Duterte’s case, he has said he would like to go to Hell, grab’s Satan’s tail and use it to whip-lash drug addicts and the corrupt.
In the meantime, Duterte is in no mood to be merciful. Because of his vicious war against drugs, various international organizations are after his scalp or if you want, a*s—politicians and do-gooders of the European Union, the Human Rights Watch, the Amnesty International, the US State Department, the Washington Post, The Guardian, The Economist, and the New York Times—to name a few.
I have covered Philippine presidents from Diosdado Macapagal in 1965 to the present one, I have never seen a president who has caught so much global attention and struck the popular imagination as Duterte. He is both notorious and popular.
To Duterte’s credit, he remains hugely popular among Filipinos. Nearly eight of ten (78 percent) Filipinos approve of his performance and 76 of every 100 Filipinos trust him, according to the Pulse Asia poll during March 15-17, 2017. From December 2016, the President is down five percentage points in job approval rating, and down seven percentage points in trust rating last March.
Duterte’s job approval is twice that of Donald Trump’s 34 percent by IBD/TIPP, 35 percent by Quinnipiac, and 38 percent by McClatchy/Marist in their March polls. In early April 2017, Trump’s ratings have hovered at 42 percent in Gallup, 46 in Rasmussen Reports, 43 in Economist/YouGov, and 46 percent in Reuters. Those ratings are nowhere near Duterte’s.
Though his is not a sinking ship yet, Duterte is early on unloading excess baggage. Smart move, Mr. President.
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