Vice President Leni Robredo has been fired from the Cabinet of President Duterte. She has been treated shabbily, according to the Inquirer.
Leni should have known from the start that as member of the Duterte Cabinet, she served at the pleasure of the President. She was at his beck and call. The President was her master. And when the President doesn’t like you, that’s it. The President can express or not express his dislike in many ways. Including your being fired by text, through a presidential subaltern.
In being fired, she didn’t enjoy the courtesy of a call from the boss himself. Nor the formality of a perfunctory letter telling her how the President appreciates her brief stint and service in the cabinet but because of sharp differences of views or approaches to governance, they cannot pursue their common goal of reducing poverty and extending prosperity to all without giving each other the flexibility or adequate elbow to pursue that goal in the manner each saw it best.
Leni had it coming. Duterte from the start had indicated he did not like her and he didn’t like her joining his Cabinet. He didn’t like her because he wanted Bongbong Marcos as the elected vice president. I think Duterte suspects BBM was cheated in the count.
Duterte did not like her joining the Cabinet because she represented the Liberal Party which during the election campaign raked up his so-called unexplained but bogus wealth and unexplained but bogus bank deposits, with some help from the supposedly independent and secretive Anti-Money Laundering Council.
Duterte, 71, the president , operates by institutional memory. We develop our memories out of the daily anecdotes we encounter. Those experiences shape us and shape our ideas and vision of the future. That is why rags-to-riches stories of wealth are so compelling. It’s like seeing light at the end of the tunnel. The same with the rise to power of once a small town mayor like Duterte.
Anyone who wants to analyze Duterte should read back to his childhood thru adulthood, his background at Ateneo where he was sexually molested by an American priest and ousted by them for perceived misbehavior, at San Beda Law School where he carried a gun to protect himself from bullies and imbibed his present knowledge of law without much diligence, at Lyceum where he took up foreign service and hobnobbed with closet rebels and where he developed his view and vision of the world as it was and as it should be, and at Davao where he tried to rule over what was virtually then a vast Wild Wild West by dealing with all kinds of lawbreakers—corrupt government men, police and military, communist New People’s Army, separatist Muslim rebels, foreign interventionists like America, and an incompetent and uncaring central government.
Duterte believes he owes it to the Marcos family to return the gesture of the old man Ferdinand who gave Digong’s dad, Vicente, the chance to serve in the Marcos cabinet as secretary of general services from 1966 to 1968 when nobody knew Duterte’s old man from Adam during the pre-martial law years.
For a decent but low-key professional from then-obscure Davao to be thrust into a national office, a Cabinet job must have been an absolutely big deal, especially to the Duterte family who emigrated to Davao from Cebu in search of greener pastures. Don Vicente put up a house on what he thought was a Davao government property only to find out somebody rich already owned it. This explains why the President hates squatters being relocated and the poor being told to hop from office to office, enduring all kinds of red tape and maltreatment, just to get a permit that should be issued without much ado.
President Duterte believes that it was Cory Aquino who offered a local government job to his mother Soledad. Mrs. Duterte declined the job which led the young lawyer Duterte to accept the job which then led to his becoming mayor of Davao for the next 23 years. For this reason, I do not believe Duterte will order the arrest and jailing of his predecessor, Benigno S. “Noynoy” Aquino III despite the latter’s supposed crime of raiding the treasury and distributing moolah to senators, congressmen and other favored politicians. Unless of course BS Aquino starts a campaign of destabilizing the Duterte administration and to install his Trojan horse, Leni Robredo.
Duterte suspects BS Aquino is doing that destabilization campaign now. Which is why he cut and cut cleanly, from Leni Robredo.
Now, is there a future for Vice President Robredo? Not much, I think. Without a Cabinet position with plenty of personnel and huge wherewithal, she cannot do much good (for the so-called poor) and thus promote herself as the next president. If you look into her website, Leni as VP promises heaven on earth —zero poverty, prosperity for all, gender equality.
Not even the richest and most powerful nations on earth can do those things. How much more of a Robredo without a Cabinet position?
In the meantime, she could hope that Duterte’s frequent invocation of a migraine as an excuse to escape from mandatory socials and events is real. Or that his constantly vexing powerful America might finally prompt the CIA with extreme prejudice.
You know what, Duterte will last his six-year presidential term. Anyone who maintains two wives and a couple of young girlfriends in a dorm is usually built to last.
