Senator Alan Cayetano set to deliver minority’s ‘contra-Sona’

Senate Minority Leader Alan Peter Cayetano will deliver a “contra-Sona”—the Senate minority’s view of what was missing in President Benigno Aquino III’s recently delivered State of the Nation Address—despite his being a shoo-in for the administration’s senatorial ticket in 2013.

Cayetano said the Senate minority’s report would not be a counter-argument to the Chief Executive’s speech before a joint session of Congress last Monday, but listed down what the minority believed were what remained to be accomplished by the administration.

“I look at the contra-Sona as a means to help this administration rather than pull it down,” Cayetano said in a text message. “Contra-Sona is the technical name but actually it’s not the intention.”

He added, “If [President Aquino’s] Sona was [titled] Report to the Boss, the minority report, or contra-Sona, would be the Dreams of the Boss.”

Cayetano, of the Nacionalista Party, said the planned coalition between his party and President Aquino’s Liberal Party was all “but a formality.”

Aside from the ruling LP and the NP, led by Sen. Manuel Villar, the administration’s powerhouse coalition also includes the Nationalist People’s Coalition of businessman Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco.

“The coalition is just a formality of the past two years of the LP and the NP working together under a critical collaboration and cooperation system,” Cayetano said.

He said the NP “helps where programs are good, criticizes and gives good suggestions if they can be improved, brings up an issue when it is in the national interest, yet the administration has not put it front and center.”

Cayetano said, “We have discovered in the last two years that the LP and NP see eye-to-eye on many issues.