President Benigno Aquino III is scheduled to deliver one of his two final State of the Nation Addresses (SONA) today. Officially reaching the homerun of his six-year-term, he is bound to deliver his programs for the country during that span of time.
Or not, if President Aquino stays true to form and use his state address to rail against the Supreme Court, former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and the other political enemies of his administration.
Who knows, he may even use the SONA to launch a new, modified version of the pork barrel or Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) or just go whole hog and invite Congress to amend the Constitution to legalize the institution of these twin funding programs.
If he does, he will invite more criticism and opposition to his administration, which he doesn’t need right now. It’s not surprising that the President is testing public opinion on the pork barrel and DAP as his legal team tries to extricate his administration from the Supreme Court ruling to spare him from future prosecution.
But the SONA is so much more than DAP. We read and learn so much about wish lists from various sectors around the country on what they want the Aquino administration to do, given the limited time it has left.
We can fire them off one by one but among the proposed bills we hope the President will approve is the long gestating Freedom of Information Bill which was surprisingly passed by Congress and is awaiting his signature.
Having fancied himself and his allies as crusaders against corruption, it’s still no small mystery why he would drag his feet on approving the proposed bill, even with his official reason being that it would be a source of abuse by media outlets and other advocacy/interest groups with a more insidious agenda.
As seen through his administration’s masking of the DAP, we see the official reason on his refusal and this stance won’t change with another administration, even one that he chose as his successor.
Other programs we hope the President would consider are safety nets and quick response systems that would cushion the effect of typhoons and other natural disasters, a more effective mass transport system (as in the case of the Bus Rapid Transit system in Cebu City) and the immediate implementation of the recovery and rehabilitation programs for areas affected by supertyphoon Yolanda.
These, and a lot more, we hope the President would mention in his SONA, but it’s better if we calibrate our expectations of what he would say today.
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