In three weeks, P-Noy will deliver his 3rd State-of-the-Nation  Address (Sona) so we deem it proper to engage him and his advisers in a healthy give-and-take about things past if only to remind them of promises made, issues and concerns addressed and expectations fulfilled. We will, as I am sure many of our readers will do as well, ask the ultimate question: Whatever happened to?
We will start with three topics which, for one reason or the other, have apparently been relegated to the sidelines and being readied to be thrown into this administration’s archives.
I refer to P-Noy’s flip-flop on the matter of presidential appointees, the simmering Apeco (Aurora Pacific Economic Zone) controversy and the P850 million plus Pagcor loss. These issues strike at the very heart of the administration’s claims of  “good governance” and could very well indicate what to expect of it as the country is expected to encounter even more turbulence and challenges in the second half of P-Noy’s six year term.
P-Noy’s flip flop: As a senator, P-Noy vigorously opposed the practice of then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in reappointing Cabinet members and other officials bypassed by the powerful Commission on Appointments (CA). To show his extreme displeasure over what was considered a misuse of presidential power and executive overreach, then Senator Aquino  even filed a bill in the Senate, No.1719, preventing the reappointment of presidential appointees if they are bypassed by the CA three times. In the bill’s explanatory note, the then neophyte senator emphatically said that “the act of the President in successively reappointing bypassed nominees is a clear mockery of the constitutional principle of ‘check and balance.’”
We agreed with P-Noy then as we believe that the constitutionally sanctioned requirement of subjecting Cabinet members and other presidential appointees, including officials of constitutional bodies except members of the judiciary is a critical feature of our democracy. We believe that these officials must not only enjoy the trust and confidence of the President but also be subjected to a rigorous process of screening and scrutiny to ensure that they have the competence, probity and integrity to assume such awesome responsibilities.
In this case, the principle of “check and balance” ensures that the appointing authority is afforded all the necessary inputs about his choices to such positions and, perhaps more importantly, confers a degree of shared responsibility between the co-equal branches of government thus enhancing an official’s standing and ability to do justice to his assignment. Why P-Noy suddenly abandoned his well founded advocacy now that he has taken over GMA’s shoes, so to speak, is not only a big mystery to most people but certainly an unprincipled act which does not speak well of his commitment to “good governance.”
His spokesmen’s paeans to “presidential prerogative” and “giving him the benefit of any doubt” are not only hollow and self-serving but proof positive of their temporizing, transactional nature. It is clear these guys’ core values and commitments — their very point of view — depend on where they are sitting. Out of power they deplore such “excessive even condescending behavior? Now that they are in power, they glory in it and even defend it to high heavens as proper and necessary. “Dupang” is how they call it in some neighborhoods.
Whatever happened on the way the to Malacañang?
The Apeco inquiry: Renowned architect and urban planner and currently Management Association of the Philippines  (MAP) President Felino Palafox — who was originally recruited to draft the Aurora Pacific EcoZone (Apeco) master plan — created quite a stir in a November 2010 Senate hearing on the workings of the zone when he said that the same was based on “faulty designs and flimsy studies.” He revealed that no rigorous feasibility studies, development plans, impact forecasts, clearances and other related studies were undertaken for Apeco and its technical subcomponents before it was implemented.
In the same hearing, it was also noted that Apeco was founded more on “wishful thinking,” not solid analysis. It was revealed that the zone’s premature operations were done at the behest of the politically powerful Angara clan and that no figures on the ecozone’s  likely impact on the poverty status, the incomes, and the livelihoods of the people of the project’s site — Casiguran town even as the zone was being  hailed as the harbinger of “development” not only to the town and Aurora but to the unexploited Pacific side of Luzon.
Palafox also charged that preliminary engineering surveys have suggested that some lands being used for the project’s corporate campus are prone to flooding and soil liquefaction. These projections, according to Palafox, have shown that the lands in question will be going underwater within 25 years — a fact which casts serious doubt on the soundness, the safety and the sustainability of the entire venture.
A number of questionable transactions were also brought up during the November 2010 hearing. The Commission on Audit (CoA) advised that Apeco’s operations were never subjected to audit scrutiny from 2008 to 2010. When a three-year CoA audit report finally released, it was noted that “transactions relative to cash advances granted for purposes other than salaries and wages were not coursed through the  required pre-audit, in defiance of CoA circular No. 2010-002,” and worse, were extended to those who were neither bonded nor regular employees of Apeco. The last we heard, after its initial funding of more than a billion pesos was about to be used up without much to show for it, early this year during Aurora Province’s founding anniversary, P-Noy committed another billion pesos or so to continue with the zone’s initial development. Aurora and this time P-Noy really love the Angaras. But that is another story.


We join the family, friends and constituents of Ilocos Norte Rep. and former First lady Imelda Romualdez-Marcos in greeting her a happy birthday and wish her many more years of bliss, peace and service to our people and to the Lord Almighty.