“If 2022 was a mistake and Uniteam was a scam, is 2028 Inday Sara’s rendezvous with destiny?”
On the third Sunday of 2021, then Pres. Duterte had a dinner-meeting with this writer, a senator, two Cabinet members and two GOCC heads, all of whom were part of his original support group when he first entertained the idea of running for the presidency.
He began by telling us outright that Inday Sara will not run for president and will remain mayor of Davao.
Next he said the Marcos couple saw him during the holidays, where BbM told him that he would run for president. PRRD told us he neither encouraged nor discouraged BbM’s quest.
PRRD suggested Bong Go for president, echoing a clamor from many in his Cabinet ostensibly for “continuity,” but Go said he was not prepared for the burdens of the presidency. I then suggested an Isko Moreno-Bong Go tandem, but the president demurred.
And so Duterte endorsed no one publicly. He even disparaged the qualities of all the candidates, from Pacquiao to Isko to Leni, but left the choicest diatribes against BbM, whom he described as “a spoiled kid” who “indulged in drugs.”
After months of trying to woo Sara, BbM’s Ate Imee was able to finally convince the latter in a Cebu City meeting to team up with her brother.
What actually prompted the daughter to join the candidate her father spurned is something between them.
Thus was the second “Uniteam” in contemporary political history born. The first was the ill-fated Cory-Doy team for the snap elections of 1986.
After the “game over” team-up was announced, BbM publicly stated that Sara wanted to be defense secretary. At that point, this writer observed that first, the Davao City mayor was quite unfamiliar with national politics, having been “local” all the time.
More importantly, having had a front seat in the political marriage negotiations between Cory and Doy, I said to myself that the BbM-Sara “Uniteam” would not last.
No president will give the defense portfolio to his VP for obvious reasons. After their victory, PBbM gave her DepEd instead.
She wanted to be a more accessible vice-president and started putting up satellite offices in major regional centers.
The president then offered to part away with some of the confidential funds left by Sara’s father to augment the veep’s second-half 2022 budget.
Accordingly, the OVP wrote a letter to the president in August, requesting for 250 million pesos. The palace through DBM released half the requested amount, but only in the second week of December, leaving the OVP just 11 working days to spend the amount or these would revert to the treasury.
Sara fell for a trap. Pinklawans, communists and administration stalwarts pounced on her hasty “misuse” of more than a hundred million in so short a time.
The HoR then launched inquisitorial hearings, assisted by their well-greased “spokesmen” and their highly paid PR machinery.
Then to get 215 HoR members to sign the articles of impeachment on the last session day, billions in pork barrel through ayuda and flood control projects had to be inserted in the notorious 2025 budget.
But all these failed, with the HoR’s deliberate actions chastised by the Supreme Court and the trial thrashed by the Senate after feeling the winds of public rejection of the mid-term administration.
The manipulation of the budgets of 2023, 2024 and 2025 was provenance for a slew of sub-standard and ghost flood control projects that worsened flooding.
It has since haunted BbM and the resigned speaker along with their chief budget manipulators headed by an appropriations chair who flew the coop and began singing like a canary.
Ordinary folks now compare 600 million charged against the vice-president versus 1.5 trillion embedded in appropriations for the last three years, that funded the most unspeakable crimes of the DPWH and legislators with the approval of the palace.
Inday Sara had no projects. All she must do is explain why Piattos et al. were used as pseudonyms for CIF recipients, amid a political environment now kinder to her because she is far more popular and far more trusted than the president.
600 million is a small bag of peanuts compared to 1.5 trillion in corruption that caused hundreds of Filipinos to die in massive floods from Luzon, to Visayas and Mindanao.
Last Wednesday, Inday Sara Duterte, elected by 32 million Filipinos to an office just a heartbeat away from the presidency, declared that she is formally claiming what could be her destiny, using the same slogan her father used in 2016 — Tapang at Malasakit, or courage drawn from compassion.
If 2022 was a mistake and Uniteam was a scam, is 2028 Inday Sara’s rendezvous with destiny?
