The ‘little girl’ that cried abuse

Despite being under hospital arrest, there’s no silencing former president, now detained legislator of Pampanga, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in her criticism of her former economics student and successor President Benigno Aquino III.

The former president has accused Aquino of “vilifying her” and claiming credit for the gains of her nine-year administration, never mind the fact that Aquino precisely won the 2010 election due to widespread outrage over her continued reign.

“Neither the President nor anyone else can truly expect to govern the next five years with nothing but a sorry mix of vilification, periodically recycled promises of action followed by lethargy, backed up by few, if any, results, and presumptuously encouraging gossip about one’s love life in which no one can possibly be interested,” Arroyo said of Aquino.

Stinging words and if Aquino doesn’t get his act together in the next few years, they may yet hold true. But the ex-president’s claim of past gains glossed over one crucial element, which is the legitimacy of her presidency.

Ask anyone who cared to remember about the Arroyo presidency and most likely, they will bring you back to 2005, that year when the “Hello, Garci” scandal broke out.

Before that, Arroyo enjoyed a measure of support from the public. When the scandal broke, no amount of apologies from her erased the fact that the public’s distrust of her sank to such depths that she had to resort to declaring holidays and beefing up security in the Palace to avoid an Edsa revolt.

Whatever gains were achieved during her tenure came despite and not because of her. The “little girl” may have conveniently forgotten that overseas Filipino workers propped up the economy with their foreign currencies while her administration only succeeded in sending more people abroad since they see very little success if they continued to stay.

She’s accusing Aquino of claiming credit for her success? Under this country’s political system, a president serves six years straight with no reelection, which means either he or she builds on the gains achieved by her predecessor.

Granted that she took over from a morally bankrupt Estrada regime, Arroyo had help from one of her advisers, the former president Fidel V. Ramos, under whose watch the country achieved a modicum of economic success.

Everything went downhill after 2005. What Arroyo and her Chief Justice Renato Corona are complaining about is Aquino’s relentless pace of house-cleaning, which means removing the accumulated garbage of corruption and abuse that her administration left in her trail.

Arroyo can harp on about her successor’s failures or lack of achievements in his barely two-year-old administration, but the Filipino people were gracious enough to allow her to rule with a mailed fist five years after 2005. If anything, she should be grateful she’s survived this far.