Marcos must think Filipinos are stupid

THAT’s the only explanation for why he did what he did in the past several days, other than if he had sniffed one too many. Stunned by the Filipinos’ rejection of his rule in the midterm elections, going into a deep reality-denial, he has refused to see that he is, incontrovertibly, the core problem of this administration.

Marcos 2nd instead announced the other day a “bold reset,” promising to cleanse his Cabinet of non-performers who have failed to meet people’s expectations. It’s the biggest dud of an announcement I’ve heard, a colossal fart whose stink will remain till this administration’s end.

C’mon, elections were just six weeks ago; now he says he undertook a performance review to determine who would get the ax? He doesn’t even say if there was a panel that undertook the review. Or was it simply the triumvirate — the president, his wife and his cousin Martin Romualdez? Or did Marcos just put photos of his Cabinet members on the wall and throw darts at them to determine who’s out.

As of yesterday, out of 38 officials of Cabinet rank, the dart hit only one, the environment and natural resources secretary, Maria Antonia Yulo-Loyzaga. The explanation? “There were perceptions that she was always on foreign trips,” Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin said.

What? A Cabinet secretary gets axed because of “perceptions”? Did Bersamin even count how many foreign trips she made, and how much this cost the government? Marcos’ axing of Yulo-Loyzaga could have projected a president cleansing his government if he had disclosed the facts, and warning the rest of his government to cease making wasteful, unproductive trips. Of course, Yulo-Loyzaga has the least connections with the first lady, as she was a childhood friend of Marcos. I wonder if the trip of the first lady with an alleged coterie of 20 to the US last March, in which Paolo Tantoco, the husband of her social secretary, reportedly died of a drug overdose, could be deemed as one such “wasteful” trip.

Two Cabinet members were reassigned to posts they really preferred: Foreign Affairs Secretary Enrique Manalo as our ambassador to the UN in New York, where he has actually nearly established social roots, having served most of his diplomatic career there in various capacities; Energy Secretary Raphael Lotilla — who my sources claim can no longer stand the pressures of the country’s biggest magnates wanting their way in the industry — to the environment and natural resources department, where he can at least call on the many tree-huggers in the country, a chic advocacy by many of our middle class.

Champagne

A “bold reset”? Manalo and Lotilla will be uncorking champagne bottles this weekend.

Human Settlements Secretary Jerry Azucar has actually been wanting to leave his post, as he found the department to be mainly a regulatory body (among other things, it supervises all of the homeowners’ associations in the country) with really no budget for him to build the 1 million low-cost homes (purportedly his expertise) that was his marching orders from Marcos. It was only the announcement that Azucar will be replaced by his undersecretary, Jose Ramon Aliling, who owns a huge construction firm by his name, that I found out this fact. Two construction-industry magnates in the human settlements department? I don’t think I need to say more.

However, Marcos may be really backtracking not to implement his “bold reset” after advisers later told him about the reality of governance in the Philippines.

It takes at least two years — and I’m talking from my experience as a former presidential chief of staff under Gloria Arroyo at the top observation post, you might say — for a Cabinet secretary to “tame” his department to follow his command, and for his own men (undersecretaries and directors) to command the organization. Whether they’re incumbent, nonperforming or crooks, Marcos’ Cabinet has been in the saddle for three years.

A replacement Cabinet secretary will take at least another two years to learn how to run his department, and by the third year, he will be a lame-duck secretary of a hated president, unable to implement what he thinks are projects his department should undertake, ignored by his staff.

Flood

Marcos 2nd will get a flood of applications, and most of them would be those who know that a stint as a Cabinet member can easily generate at least a million pesos. This would be in the form widely called now as the SOP (“standard operating procedure”) paid by contractors for contracts the department head must approve, or at least desist from approving.

Even those not involved in the process of government approval of a contract but with the ear of the president or the secretary can stop or delay a contract unless he is given his share of the SOP. A contractor confessed to me that his firm had given P25 million to a Cabinet secretary early this year for him to approve a construction contract they were proposing. This official has even managed to portray himself as “incorruptible.”

Unfortunately, the official was kicked out even before he could approve the papers of the contract. The contractor, of course, couldn’t do anything, as things like these never have a paper trail. The contractor couldn’t even meet the official to beg him to return at least half of the P25 million.

I think it is clear to most thinking Filipinos that while the Cabinet shares part of the blame for the fast decay of this administration that has accelerated this year, it is due mainly to Marcos’ very bad decisions, the most important of which:

– His attempt, undertaken by his cousin House Speaker Martin Romualdez, to amend the Constitution in order to shift to a parliamentary system to stop Vice President Sara Duterte’s momentum to become president in 2028;

– His break with the Dutertes, without whom there was no way he would have become president. Rodrigo’s charisma has even risen, which is fast being transferred to Sara. Filipinos see Marcos’ move as a betrayal, a mortal sin Filipinos think is one of the worst evils a man can do;

– His cooperation with the Communist Party of the Philippines and the neocolonial court, the International Court of Justice, to kidnap the former president, jail him in a small cell in the Hague, and undertake a trial in which witnesses aren’t cross-examined, and even remain anonymous;

– His persecution of Sara Duterte by having the House file an impeachment complaint against her, which most Filipinos believe is the Marcos clan’s evil project to politically assassinate Sara, so a Marcos proxy will win the 2028 presidential contest;

– His belligerence toward China, following US dictates, which has reduced our trade with China, ended any capital investment from the economic superpower, and stopped official financial aid from it that would have funded huge infrastructure projects in the country;

– His mismanagement of the economy, as demonstrated in his handling of the overseas gaming business, which was abruptly stopped rather than phased out, creating a crisis in the condominium market and ending the employment of Filipinos in that industry. Foreign investments in the country have drastically gone down. In his first year, he focused on setting up a Maharlika Sovereign Fund, to which government corporations gave the huge P500 million seed fund. Except for two minor investments and loans to mining firms (which certainly would be investigated after 2028), the Fund is dead in the water.

What major foreign investment has come in during Marcos 2nd’s regime? (Foreign direct investment [net inflows] fell 61.9 percent year on year in February 2025, reaching only $529 million compared to $1.4 billion in February 2024.)

This Cabinet purge brouhaha is a desperate, unthinking move by Marcos 2nd, a hallucination by a politically dead man walking. Marcos’ ass-lickers have had to struggle with how to spin this boo-boo, with his PR par excellence (and envoy to the US) Jose Romualdez resorting to astrology, writing yesterday that “the stars are still in his favor.”

Similarly, my colleague Antonio Contreras struggled through obscure political-science nonsense to claim in his column the other day that “Marcos, battered and unbowed (through this “bold reset”), has chosen to remind us all that he still has the spotlight.” Ha, ha, in the spotlight of ridicule?

For that very creative insight, Marcos 2nd should remove Oscar Orbos as chairman of the state-owned PTV network and replace him with Contreras, who has been the propaganda outfit’s vice chairman since October last year yet disclosing this only last Thursday, after blogger Sass Rogando Sasot disclosed it. What’s the use of Orbos anyway?

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Marcos must think Filipinos are stupid
Source: Breaking News PH