“Ang budget po ang pinakamalinaw na pagsasabuhay ng ating tuwid na landas.”
This was one of President Noynoy Aquino’s most sweeping statements in his recent State of the Nation Address (SONA), and it says quite a lot about the direction Aquino intends to lead us in for the next five years. However, it will only take a while for anyone who has a copy of the budget to look over it and realize how the president has seemingly shortchanged the Filipino people that elected him to power.
The inspired illusion of genuine societal change under Aquino was sweet while it lasted, but once reality hit Juan full in the face—once he realized the hollowness of the matuwid na daan slogan, with the president saying that the budget is already this idea’s clearest embodiment—suddenly, everything was no longer clouded by a deceptive haze of yellow.
And it could only be one of two things that could have caused the president’s disappointing address: either myopia or downright insincerity—maybe even both. The exaggerated celebration of his vanquishing of the wang-wang points to his myopic view of Philippine society’s ills, while his failure to touch on the most relevant social issues during the address—probably the reason why most of us tuned in to the SONA in the first place—is cruelly insincere. His patting himself on the back for a budget that allocates way too much for militarization and debt-servicing over the basic social services that a suffering people needs is only icing on the cake.
The president’s well-rehearsed and well-written SONA failed to mask his words’ lack of substance. The fact that he remained mum all throughout his speech about the sad realities that have gripped the Filipino people—the continued impunity of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the stagnancy of the Freedom of Information Act, the toxic debate regarding the Reproductive Health bill, the crisis in education brought about by the state abandonment of public universities and the untimely K-12 program, the plight of the Philippine labor force, and, of course, the continued dodging of the land reform issue iconized by his clan’s Hacienda Luisita—leaves anyone who listened to his inaugural address feeling a strong sense of betrayal.
When the president addressed the graduates of the Ateneo de Manila University’s Class of 2011, he asked them what going “down the hill” really meant. “Halfway down the hill lang ba?” he asked them, probing the graduates’ fresh minds for that courage to indeed pursue the “matuwid na daan.”
In this talk about paths and directions, then, it is clearly necessary for the president to ask himself the same question, being the Atenean that he is. The Filipino people consented to him taking the reins of the nation’s uncertain fate, and it is just right that he decides once and for all the direction he is going to take this country. Would it be the same old, beaten path his predecessors trudged, or a radically new one that would bring the country the genuine change it needs?
It is a question only he can answer, but it would be wise for him to make a decision soon, because we just can’t shrug off that overwhelming feeling that we have just been taken for a ride.
