Aquino throws jabs at Binay

By: Nikko Dizon - 9 years ago

President Aquino (right) and Vice President Jejomar Binay. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

Who’s telling the truth? Who’s lying?

President Benigno Aquino III on Thursday said people know if he or Vice President Jejomar Binay is telling the truth.

With some 370 days before his term expires, the President said he was focused on moving the country forward.

Though obviously smarting from Binay’s attack on his presidency last Wednesday, Mr. Aquino’s response seemed to be laid-back, calibrated.

“My interest is to maximize all the opportunities for our people, to run this country… I have a responsibility to make this society, this country better. I will not allow myself to be distracted by talks of politics when I think it is very clear to the people who is telling the truth, and who is lying,” he told reporters at the Livestock Philippines 2015 Conference.

On Wednesday, Binay slammed the Aquino administration’s anticorruption campaign as reeking of “selective justice.” He said the government was insensitive and inept, and specifically referred to allegations of wrongdoing in the disbursement of congressional and executive pork barrel funds, extortion in the mass transport system and the massacre of 44 police commandos in January.

READ: Binay calls Aquino admin ‘uncaring,’ ‘blundering’

“Enough is enough (tama na, sobra na),” Binay said, borrowing the ringing slogan the President’s mother, the late democracy icon Corazon Aquino, used in the campaign against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

“I gave him all the opportunity so that he would not be a spare tire,” Mr. Aquino said, adding he would address “point by point” all the wrongdoing that Binay imputed against the administration. “Maybe you would ask, how do I feel? It’s a given to every Filipino, you put yourselves in my position… I did not treat him wrong and this is what he repays me with? So, I say to him, ‘Thank you.’”

READ: Aquino on Binay: I saved him from being spare tire

Binay resigned on Monday as presidential adviser on overseas Filipino workers affairs and chief of the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council. His daughter, Makati Rep. Abigail Binay, said her father was through being the “punching bag” of Aquino allies seeking higher office, referring to the open-ended hearings in the Senate on corruption allegations against the Vice President and his family and threats to throw them in jail.

Dictator’s wrongdoing

Asked how he felt that Binay used the ‘Tama na, Sobra na’ battlecry of his mother, Mr. Aquino said: “The people felt the litany of wrongdoing of the dictatorship, all of them were the fault of the dictatorship… When (Binay) sent me his (resignation) letter, I asked him what really was the issue, he couldn’t answer me. So at that point in time, it seems he couldn’t say anything to improve the governance of our country.”

Based on Binay’s remarks on Wednesday, Mr. Aquino said, it appeared that the Vice President had “kept to himself so many secrets how to improve the governance of this country.”

“I think he has an obligation, as a member of the Cabinet, to share them,” the President said. “If you can do something to improve the lives of the people we promised to serve, why did you keep them secret all this time?”

“I was a bit surprised why there was a resignation at this time. So I called him up and eventually we got to talk and I asked him specifically what was the reason? I think the word I used was ‘casus belli’. What was the immediate reason that prompted him to do this action?” Mr. Aquino recalled.

“He said there were many and that he would write them down and send them to me. When our conversation ended, I told him, ‘Ok, I will wait for it,’” the President said. “Yesterday, although it was not unexpected, in his statement, he mentioned that he was now the opposition.”

“Perhaps this is what politics is in our country. Perhaps he thought, I wouldn’t be endorsing him so he has to show that he doesn’t need my endorsement or he could do better,” Mr. Aquino said.

‘Put your house in order’

In a statement, Justice Secretary Leila de Lima said the Aquino administration was determined to press charges against all those suspected of corruption and it just happened that Binay and his family were among the “big fishes” being targeted.

“Apparently the Vice President has not heard of the saying that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. He should first put his own affairs in order, especially the corruption cases against him and members of his family, before he even starts talking of so-called selective justice,” De Lima said.

“There is no selective justice. Just because high officials and big fish like him are feeling the long arm of the law does not mean there is selective justice. Just because we are yet to file cases against other corrupt government officials and catch others does not mean we should stop prosecuting those already on the chopping block,” she added.

“No administration is perfect. However, it is a fact that world perception of the Philippines has never been better in the past five years because of the President’s anticorruption campaign and reforms in the bureaucracy,” she said.

Interior Secretary Mar Roxas on Thursday defended the Aquino administration from Binay’s criticism.

Addressing various government frontline agencies in Indang, Cavite province, Roxas maintained that Mr. Aquino and the rest of his Cabinet had been delivering services to the people and that they had been consistent in carrying out their specific task.

“We’re not saying that what we have is perfect. We cannot say that the country is ‘super developed.’ But we have gone far. We have done many things and we’re better than where we were before,” said the potential administration standard-bearer in next year’s presidential election.

Why did it take 5 years?

Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. expressed doubts about the sincerity of Binay’s motivations for quitting his Cabinet posts and criticizing the Aquino government. “He certainly enjoyed being a Cabinet member. It took him five years to quit,” he said in a text message.

Vice President Binay just made a “powerful’’ enemy out of President Aquino with the way he had raged against the Aquino administration and thus, he could expect his supporters who are loyalists of the Chief Executive to eventually disappear, Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV said on Thursday.

“Objectively speaking, I don’t see the benefit he will get out of what he did. What he did is just to create an enemy and his enemy is the most powerful man in the country. That’s not necessarily a good thing,’’ Trillanes told reporters.

And while Trillanes agreed there were “some instances’’ that Binay’s claim against the administration as being insensitive and bumbling such as the Mamasapano incident, he said the latter was “not the perfect spokesman for that.’’

“He should be the last one (to say that). He countenanced it for five years,’’ Trillanes said of Binay at the Kapihan sa Senado forum on Thursday.

He noted for instance that no one heard anything from Binay during the height of the killings of 44 Special Action Force commandos in Mamasapano which the latter had raised against the administration.

“Where was he? He was holding boodle fights in public markets and now he is saying he was concerned about it?’’ he said. With reports from DJ Yap, Jerome Aning, Marlon Ramos, Gil C. Cabacungan and Christine O. Avendaño