Recto says Duterte’s SONA should lay out PH’s path to beat COVID-19

MANILA, Philippines — What’s the country’s path to victory over the virus?

That’s the question Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto wants to be answered in President Rodrigo Duterte’s fifth State of the Nation (SONA) on July 27.

For the President’s SONA, “the message is more important than where the messenger is,” Recto added.

“Laurel did not deliver any, Osmeña just once, and Quirino via radio from a hospital bed in Baltimore, Maryland, USA where he was recuperating,” he said in a statement on Friday.

“The principal audience of the SONA is not the politicians inside the hall but the people outside,” he added.

Recto said amid murmurs of different scenarios for Duterte’s SONA, which would be delivered in a time when the country continues to grapple with a pandemic.

“It is not for the consumption of the people who may clap in the President’s presence, but for the sovereign, of which the SONA through the ages tries to answer the one question on their minds: Have our lives gotten better?” the senator went on.

“In the time of the pandemic, the SONA should dwell less on what has been done and more on what is to be done,” he said.

“Magsasaka man o millennial, ‘yan ang kanilang hahanapin sa mensahe ng Pangulo. Ang landas tungo sa kinabukasan. The path to victory over the virus,” he added.

(May it be a farmer or a millennial, that is what they will look for in the President’s speech. The path to our future. The path to victory over the virus.)

Under the Constitution, the President is mandated to deliver his SONA before a joint session of Congress every fourth Monday of July to report on the status of the country and the government’s agenda in the years to come. [ac]