Aquino’s working style is not ‘do-nothing’

MANILA, Philippines—He’s not laid-back, his working style is just different.

Or at least that’s what President Benigno Aquino III’s deputy spokesperson said Thursday in an effort to defend him from nasty criticism.

The President himself went to the extent of talking about his busy work schedule. Before reading a prepared speech at a conference of the Employers Confederation of the Philippines (ECOP) at Marriott Hotel in Pasay City, he told his audience about two “critical” newspaper columns that, he said, implied that “I don’t work hard enough.”

“For their information, this is my third engagement for the day,” Mr. Aquino said of his noontime appearance at the ECOP conference. “I started out rising at 5:30 in the morning not because I have to plant some seeds but because I have to board a plane by 6:30 to go to the wakes of two of our party mates—one in Cebu, one in Samar.”

The wakes were for the assassinated Calbayog Mayor Reynaldo Uy and for Cebu Vice Gov. Gregorio Sanchez Jr., who died from complications of lung cancer. Both men were members of the Liberal Party.

Indeed, Mr. Aquino had a full schedule Thursday, with two more appointments after the ECOP conference—a staff meeting at
2:30 p.m. and a courtesy call by the Singapore Technologies Telemedia and ABS-CBN and Skycable at the Yellow Room in Malacañang.

Correction, please

The President did not identify the newspaper columns that he mentioned.

But there were two columns published Thursday that derided his leadership style—“On Target” by Ramon Tulfo in the Philippine Daily Inquirer and “Search for Truth” by Ernesto Maceda in the Philippine Star.

Both columnists attributed the sharp drop in Mr. Aquino’s satisfaction ratings to his being a “do-nothing Chief Executive” who was “not working hard enough to solve the country’s problems.”

According to Mr. Aquino’s deputy spokesperson Abigail Valte, the President raised the matter at the ECOP conference because he wanted to make a correction.

“I think the only time the President addresses an issue is when he wants to correct misinformation. That’s important for us, because as we’ve always said, we deal with issues and not misinformation,” she told reporters, adding:

“We don’t want that sort of misinformation spreading because … it’s not true. So I think he felt the need to address that particular misinformation that was coming around.”

Each and every document

Valte said the President “has his own working style.”

For example, she said, he “takes great pains to study all the papers” laid on his desk.

“He won’t sign a document without looking at it first,” she said, adding that he would “read each and every [document]” because he knew the effort that went into the papers brought to his attention.

Valte said Mr. Aquino brought papers to read and study during the Holy Week break last month.

She said he also made it a point to read all the briefing materials given him so he could ask the appropriate questions.

“You’ve seen him and you can see the kind of questions the President would ask. These are not ordinary or superficial questions,” Valte said.

“Maybe those who are saying that the President is laid-back do so because they do not see his working style and what he is really doing. I guess these people only choose to see what they want to see when it comes to the President,” she said.

‘Very weak’ rating

To add to Malacañang’s woes, the 2010 Global Integrity Report, a worldwide monitoring and rating outfit, has given the Philippines a “very weak” overall rating of 57 in terms of governance and efforts to curb corruption.

The report, a major investigative study of 36 countries, was released Thursday in the United States by the Washington-based Global Integrity, an award-winning non-profit organization that tracks governance and corruption trends around the world.

House Minority Leader Edcel Lagman said the 57 rating was down from the “moderate” 71 that the Philippines received in 2008.

He said this meant that the Aquino administration’s high-profile campaign on “good governance and less corruption” had been found lacking in substance and performance.

Lagman said the downgraded ranking also validated the previous finding of the Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd. that the Philippines’ corruption rating dropped to 8.9 from 8.25 on a scale of one to 10 in a survey covering the period November 2010-February 2011.

Lagman said the “good news website” proposed by Mr. Aquino’s spokesperson Edwin Lacierda “to reverse the President’s dwindling performance ratings will either be an empty page for the dearth of heart-warming stories or a perjured page of conjured ‘good news.’”

Integrity indicators

The Global Integrity Report is a tool for understanding governance and anticorruption mechanisms at the national level.

Rather than measure perceptions of corruption, the report assesses the accountability mechanisms and transparency measures in place, or not, to prevent corruption through more than 300 “Integrity Indicators” as well as journalistic reporting of corruption.

Gaps in those safeguards suggest where corruption is more likely to occur. With a report from Cynthia D. Balana