Ex-UP Pres. Jose Abueva on Manny Villar

Posted on | March 11, 2010 | No Comments

The latest SWS survey again shows Villar and Aquino practically tied considering a statistical error of about 2 %. Aquino has lost so much support from his earliest preference of some 60% last year. And other candidates are also gaining support.

Manny Villar can be our next President. And he will be a good one.

Manny Villar is the target of concerted attack and propaganda from all quarters because he has a good chance of becoming our next President.

Why? He attracts support from the middle class and the lower classes, especially the poor. The rich and upper classes prefer their old friends and allies in the traditional elite.

Manny Villar has the capacity, in the long run, to upset the status quo of mass poverty, injustice, perennial conflict, including violent conflict, and high population growth. Because he can unite our fractious society and destructive politics. Because will bring about effective and accountable leadership, governance, and the reform of our political institutions.

He is no pretender as the good against all evil.

When you come to think of it, in our kind of costly, traditional politics most professional politicians are motivated by a mix of selfish personal interest, public service, and altruism. Even nonpoliticians like most citizens are normally both virtuous and selfish. But some presidential candidates pretend to be the incarnation of ideals and virtue.

It is untrue that Manny Villar has spent billions on his campaign. He does not have that kind of money. He may have more than the others but he is not reckless, as his rivals paint him to be.

And some of his envious rivals are also spending substantial.

The propaganda is that Manny Villar is buying the presidency. But the presidency is not for sale and the great majority of our voters do not sell their votes. It is an insult to most of our people to suggest that their political support can be bought.

Manny Villar does not rely for his appeal and vision for change and reform on heroic parents, celebrity-masa appeal. Neither does he personally attack his rivals. He is and wants to remain a unifier, a coalition builder for leadership, change and reform.

He is using his own means, ideas, and persuasion in his campaign with the help of his co-leaders and supporters nationwide.

For all the unrelenting damnation Manny gets for alleged misuse of his power and office, no judgment of his alleged corruption has been made by any court of justice.

Earlier on the Senate majority freed him of the charges of irregularity in the so-called insertion of an item in the appropriations act to favor his real estate. It turned out that the item had been approved four times by the Senate. The pork barrel practice institutionalizes the insertions of legislators.

Then the Senate led by his presidential rivals, chaired by the Senate president who is a known partisan, signed a resolution condemning Villar and asking him to pay back P6 billion to the government. The Senate adjourned without approving the self-serving report of Villar’s opponents and rivals. This blatant partisanship is one of many practices that have destroyed the Senate’s legitimacy and credibility. Our nationally elected Senate and many of its members make it one of our dysfunctional institutions of governance.

Of all presidential candidates, Manny Villar has the leadership competence, personality and experience to unite likeminded and contrary groups and political factions. To seek to unite our weak and divided and demoralized nation.

When he becomes president, Manny Villar will have the understanding and the will and skill to mobilize a political majority to effect fundamental changes in our presidential and unitary political system. We need institutional and system change as much as a change in leaders and in our people’s condition and participation in governance.

No other presidential candidate can match Villar’s ability and credibility as a forceful national leader. Among his rival candidates Villar is the only one who became the Speaker of the House, and then the President of the Senate.

As Speaker he led the House in the impeachment of a sitting President, the only one ever impeached. Because the Senate impeachment trial failed, opposition Senators walked out people power was organized at EDSA and other cities. Cabinet members dispersed, and people power and the withdrawal of support from the military and police forced the president’s resignation.

Manny Villar’s leading rival is banking mainly on the heroism of his parents and his potential for honest leadership. But given the state of the nation and the weaknesses of our democracy, we need much more than the assurance of honest leadership. Our revered President Cory was indubitably honest and religious. But in her difficult circumstances she could not govern effectively.

In their own time, most of our presidents could not, did not, really reduce poverty and corruption substantially because of inherent weaknesses and disabilities in our kind of democratic institutions and practices and their limitations as leaders. Nor did they reduce injustice and inequality. But certainly they did what they could. So did many outstanding local government leaders who were quite successful; and some nongovernmental leaders and movements that also improved their communities.

Twenty-four years after EDSA, and 23 under the 1987 Constitution,  our democracy is at risk because of its failure as a whole to deliver on its exaggerated promises and the growing dissatisfaction of our people with the way it fails to deliver on its promises.

Our country is now the 12th most populous in the whole world, although it is the 71st in land area. As many as seven million Filipinos have gone abroad for a better life.

Our major media establishments are big businesses in themselves with their own vested interests and partisanship. They belabor  the weaknesses of our leaders and government while minimizing the good things being done for the people in our dysfunctional system of politics and governance. Catholic Church leaders gave us moral leadership that brought down the Marcos dictatorship. Since then bishops with their moral authority have assumed partisan roles not unlike the politicians and are campaigning for we know whom.

In addition to a change in leadership in the presidency and Congress and the local governments, we need basic changes in our political system and our policies and programs of governance. Starting with our electoral and political party systems.

Manny Villar has rebuilt and revitalized the sickly Nacionalista Party that was the party of national unity for independence from the United States, by building a national coalition of political forces, including the Left and the Marcos siblings. Mar Roxas has also revitalized the Liberal Party as one of the two pillars in our original semi-two-party system.

Already, there is so much alarmist talk of a failure of elections. And the President of the Senate is thinking aloud that, if the elections do fail, the military and the police should assume power and authority. Another group has been planning and organizing for a Transition Revolutionary Government, also in alliance with “progressive military leaders. This is what is meant by our democracy being at risk.

In these dire circumstances of our nation and democracy, we need a national leader who can organize and lead us out of our national disunity and self-destructiveness.

We face  a hotly and viciously contested presidential election on May 10. We have an opportunity to have good, effective governance and real reforms. Not just a contest in personality and win-ability.

We should not elect someone as president for on-the-job training in national leadership. Because there are others who can lead us better.

Jose V. Abueva

Political Science scholar and professor and advocate of political and constitutional reform, and a nonkilling Philippines. Member of the Citizens’ Movement for a Federal-Parliamentary Philippines.

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