Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Juan Ponce Enrile (File photo frmo the Senate Public Relations and Information Bureau)
MANILA, Philippines — Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Juan Ponce Enrile echoed Filipinos’ frustration at subpar government services, particularly after another power outage struck Ninoy Aquino International Airport (Naia) on Friday.
“Fire all of them,” the former Senate president said in his weekly television program on Saturday.
Enrile said the apology of Bryan Co, the officer in charge of the Manila International Airport Authority (MIAA), is unacceptable and should not be accepted.
Co, senior assistant general manager of MIAA, was made officer in charge after the Ombudsman placed General Manager Cesar Chiong on preventive suspension after the reassignment of around 285 MIAA employees.
Chiong was suspended shortly after a power outage struck Naia’s Terminal 3 on May 1, but his suspension was not related to the outage.
On May 17, the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines’ shut down air traffic over the country for several hours to fix the system, but another outage hit Terminal 3 on Friday afternoon.
Power outages have become more frequent at the airport beginning in September 2022. The worst was on Jan. 1 when hundreds of flights were disrupted for days.
“Fire all of them,” said Enrile, who has worked in government intermittently since the 1960s. “Replace them with people more sensitive to their reputation and sensitive to their job and sensitive to the plight of the public.”
“When you enter public service, you must swear that you will faithfully discharge the powers of the position that you are given and all others that you will get or receive in the government,” he also said. “You can’t be sleeping [on the job].”
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had earlier ordered Transportation Secretary Jaime Bautista to “fast-track” all negotiations for the upgrade of equipment at the country’s airports.
Marcos also said that the country’s airports must “have a proper backup system so if the whole system fails, like it did on Jan. 1, we have a complete system ready to go.”