The defeat of Sergio Osmeña III in the May 9 senatorial election came as a surprise to many. Osmeña III is the grandson of Sergio Osmeña, the second president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines (who was known for his honesty and fairness), and the son of Sergio Osmeña Jr., a controversial pre-martial law era senator and Liberal Party candidate for president in the November 1969 election. Osmeña, Jr. lost to Ferdinand Marcos, who ran for reelection under the Nacionalista Party.
Because the Osmeña family was identified with the political opposition during the early months of martial law in the country, Sergio Osmeña III was among those detained at Fort Bonifacio by military authorities. His dramatic escape with fellow detainee Eugenio Lopez Jr. was recounted in the 1995 film Eskapo. Actor Richard Gomez, who is now a city mayor, portrayed him.
After his escape, Osmeña stayed abroad. He returned to the country after President Marcos relinquished power in 1986.
Thereafter, Osmeña easily won a seat in the Senate on account of his surname. He won in his subsequent bids for reelection because of his surname, and also on account of his industry, and to the publicity generated by his 1995 bio-flick.
Six months into the administration of President Benigno Aquino III, Osmeña headed a Senate investigation into the status of missing public funds emanating from the Malampaya natural gas find off the coast of Luzon. His computations indicated that some P130 billion was missing.
Eventually, the National Treasurer, the Secretary of Finance, and the Secretary of the Budget admitted to Osmeña and his colleagues that P136 billion (not P130 billion as suspected) was missing and unaccounted for. Ironically, the Aquino administration earlier accused the President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s camp of stealing P999 million of the same fund.
Louis “Barok” Biraogo, a public-interest advocate, sued the three Aquino administration officials before the Office of the Ombudsman on the strength of the findings made by Osmeña.
Despite all that, why did Osmeña get clobbered in the recent polls?
For starters, Osmeña aligned himself with presidential candidate Grace Poe. This move cut whatever ties he had with President Aquino III and the pro-administration LP. It meant Osmeña was on his own.
Every political observer knows that it isn’t easy to campaign when one is neither aligned with the administration party nor identified with the genuine political opposition party.
How can Osmeña, a political veteran with a track record, get less votes than Risa Hontiveros (who unsuccessfully ran
for senator in 2010 and 2013), and Leila de Lima, the ex-Justice Secretary under whose watch the drug lords detained at the national penitentiary were allowed to enjoy extraordinary perks and privileges? The answer—Osmeña was not aligned with the LP while Hontiveros and de Lima were.
More specifically, the LP national headquarters was located at the Novotel at the Araneta Center in Cubao, Quezon City. Recall that it is the same hotel where a number of automated voting machines were reportedly sighted on the morning of election day. It is also the hotel where 20 foreign executives of Smartmatic, the controversial Venezuelan company that provided the voting machines and their computerized technology, were billeted before and for the duration of the canvassing of ballots. Why the Smartmatic executives chose to stay at the same hotel used by the LP, instead of staying in other hotels in
order to avoid suspicion, is a question Smartmatic and the LP refuse to answer.
There is also the admission by Smartmatic’s Marlon Garcia that hours after the canvass began, he tampered with the computer script of the transparency server used in the canvass, without getting permission from the Commission on Elections. That act was a clear violation of the pertinent protocols established by the Comelec.
No wonder the camp of vice presidential candidate Bongbong Marcos is furious at Smartmatic. On the first day of the canvass, Bongbong was leading by more than a million votes over his nearest rival, Leni Robredo of the LP. The next day, Bongbong lost his lead. Since then, he has been consistently trailing Robredo.
Another casualty of the senatorial race is Francis Tolentino, the ex-chairman of the Metro Manila Development Authority, who was running purportedly as an independent candidate. Reckoned from the volume of his political advertisements, Tolentino must have spent hundreds of millions of pesos in his campaign.
When Tolentino was MMDA chairman, the traffic mess in the metropolis was so horrible that President Aquino had to enlist the help of the Highway Patrol Group just to straighten up the traffic mess.
In early 2015, Tolentino was often out of town. He was also criticized for allowing traffic lights meant for Metropolitan Manila to end up in the Bicol region.
The Commission on Audit also scored Tolentino for spending almost a million pesos to renovate a rotunda near the Ninoy Aquino International Airport which he knew was going to be demolished in a matter of months.
Prior to the election season itself, the media reported Tolentino’s alleged involvement in an LP provincial meeting held south of Manila, and where scantilly-clad girls provided entertainment. The criticism the LP got as a result of that embarrasing event prompted LP leaders to delete Tolentino from the list of official LP senatorial candidates.
In sum, many voters noted Tolentino’s anomalies and refused to vote for him.
Although Tolentino got the endorsement of at least three presidential candidates, their endorsements did not translate to votes that Tolentino badly needed. Each presidential candidate who endorsed Tolentino must have realized that it was impossible for one person to support all three presidential candidates, and that in the end, Tolentino can support only one of them.
In all likelihood, therefore, all three presidential candidates saw through the lopsided deal and decided in the end to junk Tolentino.
What’s the lesson to be learned here? An independent candidate for senator should align himself with only one presidential candidate.