E·N·Q·U·I·R·Y
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL
A prescription for unity
Tuesday, 08 07, 2007
The recent victory at the polls of the opposition has become a nightmare. To the great number of voters out there who worked their butts off for an opposition sweep, the triumph was won at too great a cost to have been worthwhile for themselves. There was not even a moment for them to savor the victory.
Just as soon as they were proclaimed, the honorable senators, particularly, went their own individual ways, pursuing their respective agenda without regard to the collective will of the electorate who expected them to work together, pursue a common agenda, and carry the fight to Malacañang.
Many opposition congressmen have already declared their alignment with the ruling majority in the House of Representatives. The 14 opposition senators are bickering among themselves, blinded by the prospect of dispensing spoils in 2010. The winners have resorted to name-calling, forgetting the glorious 90 days of the electoral campaign when everything seemed to be going great guns for them. More’s the pity that four opposition members of the Senate, by aligning with the minority administration senators, have delivered that chamber to Malacañang!
For us observers who definitely want the opposition to succeed, nothing can be more disconcerting than the spectacle of victors acting as if they were the losers, or acting out roles reserved for the losers. Imagine the opposition senators having to fight over the crumbs among the legislative committees, whereas by rights they should be chairing the banner committees.
What is obviously lacking is leadership. No one wields the baton, to synchronize the confused noise emanating from senators and congressmen, and turn this babel into a masterful symphony of opposition harmony. Which prompted a wag to remark that at best, what the minority leaders wield is…a clanging cymbal!
The gains made in the last elections have all been put to waste.
The fight over the chairmanship of committees in the Senate is a dismaying example. Regardless of which group of senators says what or who should lead a committee, their internal rules require a majority vote of senators to elect the chairman. All that the 14 senators in the opposition (ostensibly comprising the majority) have to do is band together and vote for whom they want to head particular committees. The majority-minority dichotomy established for purposes of the election of the Senate president has become functus oficio! Whereas the pure majority-versus-minority demarcation governing other business of the Senate should now rely on who identifies himself with the opposition and who identifies himself with the administration, the fact of the matter has been miserably lost on the opposition, on account of factitiousness among themselves.
Detained President Joseph Estrada, the acknowledged leader of the opposition, has not used his vast powers of suasion to make recalcitrant members of the opposition toe the line. It makes one wonder whatever happened to the kind of leadership he exhibited during the elections — cobbling up a formidable team, dictating the pace of the campaign, refereeing the opposite personalities, mustering the resources, defining the issues. Does he still call the shots?
Having four presidential wannabes (Villar, Legarda, Lacson, Roxas) — make that five, to include an improbable Jinggoy Estrada) — naturally would produce, this early, preemptive maneuvers by each, designed to gain advantage over — or even “kill” — the others. For as long as they will be sniping at each other from now until 2010, one can fairly conclude they will have mutually maimed each other by then, mutilated each others’ credentials, to the delight of Malacañang.
Might it not be best for the opposition, this early, to have its anointed for 2010, and toward that end work for that chosen one? It keeps the gains of 2007 fairly well maintained or improved upon when elections in 2010 come around. It removes from the ranks those who would otherwise use their identification with the opposition as a subterfuge for subverting or destroying it. If all four (five?) are allowed to bludgeon each other within the opposition, no one among them will be left standing to put up even a ghost of a fight when the real war begins. If one is anointed now, we have all the way up to 2010 to build him up.
Estrada has his work — or his leadership, if you will — cut out for him. He could define who will hoist the opposition banner in 2010 this early. But let us suppose that he, for some expedient reason or another, acquiesces in each wannabe’s decision to march to the beat of their own individual drummers, without any regard to the route and participants of the parade. In that case, Estrada should not hope to see the sidelines chock-full of the applauding masses, cheering the opposition on its victory walk to Malacañang..
In the manner that one should not suffer fools gladly, the opposition need not live — from now on until 2010 — with someone who has not consecrated all his energies and intellect to the purposeful act of lawfully reclaiming the presidency that Gloria Arroyo has stolen to usurp. The equivocators, vacillators, waverers, wafflers and fence sitters on this issue should be thrown out this early.
Like in other jurisdictions, a government-in-waiting should already be identified. And it takes a leader’s determination -—which Estrada or anyone who fills his shoes has to have — to seize that defining moment of identifying the standard-bearer who shall lead the opposition even as, in Milton’s phrase, he “stands and waits” for 2010.
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