TRANSPORTATION Secretary Arthur Tugade will stay in his post despite calls for his resignation over his failure to address the Metro Rail Transit 3 mess after more than a year in office, the Palace said Tuesday.
In a Palace briefing, Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque said the problems haunting MRT-3 were the result of cumulative errors in policy and operational decisions made by the previous administration, and that Tugade, President Rodrigo Duterte’s San Beda Law classmate, was trying to resolve these.
“The way I see it, we have not reached the point where there is a need to remove Secretary Tugade. He enjoys the full trust and confidence of the President,” Roque said in a mix of Filipino and English.
“The President has said he will back up Secretary Tugade in whatever he may need to effect immediate reform of the MRT,” he added.
On Saturday, two party-list congressmen—Rep. Gary Alejano of Magdalo and Rep. Ariel Casilao of Anakpawis—called for Tugade’s ouster, given the continued technical problems that hound Metro Manila’s commuter train system that transports half a million people a day.
Roque also assured train commuters that President Duterte is not indifferent to their suffering, and that he will use his political will to improve the country’s public transportation system.
“We accept the challenge. We are moving forward and we promise [a] better MRT to our riding public,” he said.
“With the President [saying] that he will be responsible for the MRT, let us give the President the opportunity to rectify the manya problems that his administration inherited from the past,” he added.
Roque also responded to a statement by Senator Grace Poe, who said that Tugade should have done his job in the year he has been in office, rather than blame his predecessors.
“We are not washing our hands of this. We accept the challenge at the MRT and the President himself has apologized because of the constant breakdowns,” Roque said. John Paolo Bencito and Rio N. Araja
“We are not resorting to finger pointing. We are just laying out the problem. Changing the maintenance provider… that was done by the previous administration. We can’t fix it overnight,” he added.
Tugade earlier said he would not step down over recent glitches in the MRT-3, saying only the President can make him leave.
On Monday, the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan and other groups filed a graft case before the Office of the Ombudsman against former Transport secretary Joseph Emilio Abaya, accusing him of approving an anomalous maintenance contract for the MRT3.
The complaint said the agreement that Abaya signed with Busan Universal Rail Inc. (BURI) was anomalous and disadvantageous to the government.
They blamed the onerous contract for the degradation of the train system, and its poor services and poor quality of the trains.
Also on Monday, Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II ordered the National Bureau of Investigation to look into the possibility that there was sabotage in the decoupling incident at the MRT3 last week.
NBI Director Dante Gierran said he has assigned a team of investigators to look into the Nov. 16 incident.