"2022 is three years away. There is ample time for the change, if the Comelec really wants it."
"2022 is three years away. There is ample time for the change, if the Comelec really wants it."
Midway into his term, the approval rating of President Duterte is still going up. He seems to have the uncanny ability to say and do things that the public approves at the right time.
Over the last few weeks, the President did two things that can only enhance his favorable rating among Filipinos. First was his directive to send back the Canadian trash that has been stuck with us ever since its arrival in 2014. Today, only 69 vans containing trash remain and were the ones returned to Canada. Somehow, 40 of the container vans containing trash were disposed in the province of Tarlac.
If it were not for the decisiveness of the President, the trash would still be here because the Canadian government was taking its own sweet time to take back the trash. We had to recall some of our diplomats to Canada and a presidential order to speed up the return of the garbage even if the Philippine government will have to shoulder freight expenses. With that, things started to move faster. The garbage is now on its way to Canada.
This is not the first time that the country’s environment has been damaged that somehow can be traced to Canada. In March 1996, Marcopper, a mining company located in the island of Marinduque which was owned by a Canadian corporation, basically destroyed Marinduque’s environment. The dam containing mine tailings burst and destroyed the Makulapnit-Boac river system. In spite of repeated appeals to restore the environment, nothing was done up to this day. The Canadian company simply left the country.
The moral of this story is that there are indeed compelling reasons why mining was stopped by the Duterte administration. Give the mining companies a blank check and the environment will be destroyed in no time at all. There is really no such thing as responsible mining which will not eventually damage the ecosystem. Once a mountain disappears, there is really no way of bringing it back.
There are a lot of quarters edging the government to reopen mining to the fullest but so far, the government has not agreed. Certainly, the government is losing revenue on account of its refusal to restart full mining operations including the much despised open pit mining. In the end, the government will have to weigh whether the revenue that will be derived from the mining companies is more important than the destruction to our environment. It is understandably a difficult decision to make but so far, Secretary Roy Cimatu and the President has not agreed.
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The second thing that Duterte did was to make a presidential suggestion to the Commission on Election to replace Smartmatic as the election provider. The President said this in his speech to the Filipino community during his recent third trip to Japan. He told the Comelec to look for a more reliable provider which was, for all intents and purposes, saying that Smartmatic could not be trusted to insure fair and honest elections.
Since the President is the repository of all intelligence reports, he must have very strong reasons for making the suggestion. He did not accuse the Comelec directly of corruption but that is basically what he did when he asked why Smartmatic seem to have a stranglehold on the Comelec by always winning the bidding.
Usually, when the President makes a suggestion, it is usually an order. Yet, the initial reaction by the Comelec thru its spokesman James B. Jimenez was lukewarm. He said that the suggestion was well taken but there is a law which necessitates bidding. Of course, he came back later saying the Comelec is now studying how to sell the Smartmatic voter counting machines.
Regardless of the reasons of the Comelec, the strongest reason why Smartmatic should be dropped is that it is foreign-owned and -managed. There is a law that prohibits foreigners from participating in any shape or form in our elections. Why the Comelec has chosen all these years to rely on a foreign-managed company to be our election provider is hard to understand. Comelec should be the first one to encourage Filipino managed companies to upgrade their capabilities to be able to participate in the bidding so that if something goes wrong, they could be held accountable. Foreigners however, can easily disappear as it has been happening in many cases.
But if the Comelec chooses to find ways not to comply, that will be their own lookout. We know what happens to subordinates who do not follow presidential suggestions regardless of whether an agency is independent or not. President Duterte must know something that he is not saying about the conduct of automated elections. If he again raises the issue in his forthcoming State of the Nation Address next month, the Comelec should really start moving.
For its part, the Comelec has been vouching for the integrity of our automated elections. Yet, credible questions have been raised by competent people who know and understand how our automated election works. These questions have never been answered satisfactorily by Comelec and Smartmatic for that matter.
The two most important issues here right now is the order of the President to replace Smartmatic so that the conduct of the next presidential elections will be unquestionably fair and honest. The other is for our elections to be an all Filipino affair devoid of any foreign participation. 2022 is three years away. There is ample time for the change, if the Comelec really wants it. If not, it will again dilly dally until time will run out and Smartmatic will again be back on the saddle come 2022.