It is good that P-Noy has stepped in and offered to mediate the increasingly acrimonious public spat between Budget Secretary Butch Abad and Comelec Chairman Sixto Brillantes Jr. over the poll body’s proposed 2013 budget. For a while there, Brillantes threatened to quit as he expressed disappointment over the drastic cut in the poll body’s budget from a high of P24 billion later reduced to P13.5 billion and finally to P8 billion. He noted that the reduction was completely unacceptable, especially since he will be presiding over the 2013 mid term elections and he had promised when he accepted the post that he will make sure that the same will be automated not manual after experiencing our first successful automated elections in 2010.
He should know whereof he speaks. Considered the dean of the country’s election lawyers he knows the ins and outs, nay the pitfalls of manual elections. He knows the dangers, as it were, of such an operation being easy prey to human intervention every step of the way from the registration of voters to printing of ballots to the selection of the board of inspectors to the voting proper to the counting and registration of votes to proclamation. All of these steps are fraught with all kinds of problems leading to the loss of lives, property and self respect. And we are not even talking here of the activities outside of the Comelec’s operations which in every election before 2010 can be nightmarish and truly a blot on our democratic aspirations.
Those real possibilities Brillantes can no longer countenance especially since the 2013 elections will be the first and last national poll he will preside over as he will retire before the next presidential elections in 2016. Which is probably the reason he boiled over when he learned that his non-stop pleading with Abad to spare the Comelec’s budget from the proverbial budgetary cutting machine went to naught. But all is not lost now that Brillantes’ “shock operations,” if we may call it such, got P-Noy and the general public to react positively to his entreaties.
Now, whether Abad will continue justifying his drastic cut using all kinds of figures and justifications despite P-Noy’s intervention remains to be seen. As the Chief Executive himself advised: “I am used to act as a referee so I will talk to both of them as it is our obligation to have a peaceful and credible elections next year. ”
I have no doubt that a peaceful, honest and credible election is what all of us, P-Noy’s critics included, want in 2013. It behooves Abad to listen to Brillantes’ plea and convince him that the cuts he ordered were not meant to handicap him and unhinge this critical democratic exercise in the name of fiscal prudence.
Otherwise, if his arguments do not respond to the realities on the ground to the point that it will degrade the poll body’s capability to conduct an election we can all subscribe to and be a lot prouder after then he can be rest assured that the public condemnation will be swift and long lasting. In fact, when Brillantes’ protestations remained unanswered and until P-Noy came forward to intervene, that nasty rumor that Abad was deliberately making life hard for Comelec since, for reasons of their own,  he and his party mates are really bent on going back to manual. Until -Noy openly advised he is obligated to proceed with automation to make sure that we will have a peaceful and credible elections, the rumor mill was rife with all kinds of tantalizing stories and scenarios which can only be described as unflattering to him and the Liberal Party. His latest statement should now put all of these rumors and speculations to rest.


Up to now even as the PNP has declared as solved the robbery-killing of our colleague and former Philippine Tourism Authority (now TIEZA) Chief Nixon Kua, I cannot help but blame them for Kua’s death. Had they only been more pro-active and thorough in keeping our people safe in their workplaces and communities we should not be mourning for Nixon today.
We are informed, for example, that the four suspects in the case had several other warrants of arrest and should have been in jail for their latest crime — the gang rape of a minor. But no. They remained free and doing their criminal activities like nobody’s business. The reports say that they actually staged that robbery to have some money to pay off their victim and move on to the next criminal operation.
If only the police had done their job and conducted a sweep of the squatter colony just outside the Ayala Greenfields gated community which they usually do at least twice a week then Nixon would still be alive today. If only the police and the barangay officials in that place where the suspects fled (did they actually live there as well?) after the incident been more concerned about the safety of their own community then this dastardly act would have been prevented as well.
But no. They allowed incidents such as Kua’s murder to come about first before they bothered to check on each and every resident with gusto. That is pure and simple negligence. It’s tokenism at its worst.
Of course, no amount of investigations and, yes, finger pointing can bring Nixon back to life at this point. But it is good that with his death people are now getting to be more involved in making the police and other public servants more accountable and pro-active. They are now getting to be more vocal not only about police neglect but their abuses as well. I suspect the daily dose of news about crime and other misdeeds not only in traditional media but in social networks as well is the product of public pressure and awareness. Now people are getting more assertive and demand that the true picture of criminality in the country are exposed and resolved. I am told that there are more citizens reporting about crimes which are being committed and even planned acts of mayhem.
Which is why we now know that contrary to the administration’s assertions that crime volume across the country has declined, there has actually been an uptick in criminal activities in P-Noy’s time from killings to drug pushing to human trafficking to hold ups and petty misdeeds to kidnap-for-ransom, to name a few of the more pronounced ones. Even international aid agencies and foreign media have recorded a rise in criminal activities which gives a lie to the administration’s pronouncements. If Nixon’s death in the hands of those young robbers can engender in all of us a sense of urgency in the fight against criminality and transform us into active partners in crime prevention, then we shall have given him a real tribute and make our condolences a positive response to the call for vigilance and civic citizenship in these challenging times.