DIALOGUE MAY be the best way to air issues out. This was what the Issue and Policy Analysis (IPA) Cluster believed as they staged “Halalan 2010: Ipabatid, Ipahiwatig, Ipaglaban ang boto mo!,” an open conference session on February 12.
“Hopefully [this will be] an avenue for responsible voting,” IPA Cluster Head Hannah Cocos said.
Students who attended were given the opportunity to openly question and defend Ateneo’s top four presidentiables from last month’s Blue Vote. A group represented a candidate and they have to answer questions individually or by group. Judges will raise a flag to the team that argues better.
“To have the heart for politics means to have the [volition] to fight,” said The Assembly President Ross Tugade, one of the judges for the session, on the debates.
Impersonations of Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, Gilbert “Gibo” Teodoro, Richard “Dick” Gordon and Manny Villar were also presented at the start to address the need of students to know the candidates’ platforms.
Controversies
Some of the questions directly attacked some of the candidates.
Answering the question of whether they would still vote for Aquino if he bore a different last name, the Aquino team said, “Noynoy is the only one who believes in consultative governance [and] in times when a big decision is made, all the involved sectors will take part in the decision-making.”
However, the Gordon camp won, arguing, “[Aquino] may symbolize democracy, but things are different now. He symbolizes political ‘inactivism’ at present [as] he authored very few bills.”
If Teodoro won the presidency, would he punish Gloria? The Teodoro supporters answered, “He will not harm the very person who gave him his big break. However, he will punish with reason.”
Meanwhile, Villar’s team was questioned about his use of the image of poverty in his campaigns. Their answer: “He [Villar] understands the poor because he was poor.”
Tugade, however, disagreed with this. “It’s unfair to visualize only the urban poor [those in the commercials of Villar] because according to studies and statistics, the rural poor are even more impoverished than their urban counterparts.”
Background
The four presidentiables who topped Blue Vote were chosen because “they were more or less the top priorities of Ateneans,” said Andrea Bernarte, who took part in the event. The organizing team also had time constraints to consider.
Cocos agreed. “We won’t have any preference to the presidents. We are only acknowledging the arguments on why [the] candidates are worth considering.”
The talk usually happens seven times a year but this time, IPA Cluster decided to have a one grand session. “We faced problems in the sustainability of the project because we found it challenging to organize an event at almost every month… so we planned a one grand Kapihan,” said Cocos.
Arguments for the candidates
“Noynoy is the only one who believes in consultative governance [and] in times when a big decision is made, all the involved sectors will take part in the decision-making.”
– On Noynoy Aquino
“He will not harm the very person who gave him his big break. However, he will punish with reason.”
– On Gibo Teodoro
“He [Villar] understands the poor because he was poor.”
– On Manny Villar
“He [Villar] understands the poor because he was poor.”
– On Manny Villar
There was an opinion piece in the Inquirer on Villar not being a Tondo poor boy after all.
(http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/letterstotheeditor/view/20100313-258329/Villar-was-never-a-Tondo-poor-boy)
Posting it here for reference:
Villar was never a Tondo poor boy
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:05:00 03/13/2010
Filed Under: Elections, Politics, Manny Villar
THE MARCH 7 ARTICLE ON Manny Villar’s house along Moriones Street in Tondo confirmed the belief that he was never poor, never spent his Christmas on the street and never swam in a pool of garbage. In the early 1960s, if you had a three-story house in a 60-square-meter lot in the business district of Tondo, you were considered an aristocrat.
Not too far from that Moriones house were shanties leading to the pier where children went to the nearby public schools for education. Such was not the case of Villar: he went to Holy Child Catholic School for his elementary education and to Mapua for high school. Coming from Moriones going to Mapua, Villar had to pass by three outstanding public high schools: Jose Abad Santos High School, Arellano High School and Teodora Agoncillo High School, and public schools in the latter part of the 1950s and 1960s were at their best.
But not for the Villar children. Because their father was a white-collar employee and they had a businesswoman for a mother, Manny and his siblings were able to study in the best private schools nearby. They had corned beef for breakfast (as told in Villar’s ad with Boy Abunda) and I am pretty sure suahe and other seafoods for lunch or dinner.
During the times that Villar claimed he was poor, his family actually belonged to the AB and upper C economic strata or the top 10 percent of the population. As in the C-5 controversy, in the conversion of agricultural land in Iloilo, in the landgrabbing of the Dumagats’ land in Norzagaray and his questionable use of socialized housing funds among many others, Villar shows a penchant for covering the truth.
I hope television’s investigative journalists can dig deeper into this so the poor people who are being used will find out the truth.
—ELEN FRANCISCO,