Biazon turns down DPWH top post

Sen. Rodolfo Biazon said yesterday that he had declined an offer from Malacañang for him to assume the post of public works secretary because he felt he was not qualified.

He said he intends to serve his term as senator, which will expire in mid-2004.

"There are other personalities in the Senate, especially those belonging to the administration bloc, who can be appointed to the position of secretary of the Department of Public Works and Highways," the former Armed Forces chief said in a statement.

"I do not want to be a square peg in a round hole, to be the secretary of a department where my experience, training and education would best suit me for some other field."

In 1989, Biazon, then a Marine general, became popular for helping quash a coup by disgruntled military officers against President Corazon Aquino, who later appointed him chief of the Armed Forces.

He ran and won in the 1992 senatorial elections. He lost a re-election bid in 1995 and won a second term in 1998. He is eligible for re-election in 2004.

In an interview, Biazon also revealed that he turned down earlier offers to head the soon-to-be-established Department of Housing and the Bureau of Customs.

Biazon said the offers were relayed to him by go-betweens and through the "leadership" of his political party, the opposition Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino (LDP), apparently referring to party president, Sen. Edgardo Angara.

Biazon said the offers were made after President Arroyo’s stunning announcement that she would no longer run for the presidency in the 2004 polls to concentrate on beefing up the country’s poverty-stricken economy during her remaining 18 months in office.

She called on other parties, including the opposition, to help her improve the lives of Filipinos.

Despite his decision to decline the offers, Biazon reiterated his support for the President’s efforts to solve the country’s pressing problems and urged his partymates to do the same.

The LDP has established a record of providing "critical collaboration" with the administration as it had done during the administration of Fidel Ramos, Biazon said.

Last Tuesday, Angara announced that the LDP, the country’s largest opposition party, was "heeding the call of President Arroyo to forswear, until 2004, partisan politics and ideological bickering."

"The country’s welfare should be put ahead of political ambition — whether of parties or persons," Angara said in a statement. "We, in the LDP, are ready to enter into critical collaboration with the administration in putting in place those economic reform policies that will make development perceptible and meaningful to every Filipino."

Angara asked his colleagues in the Senate "not to involve the President in the affairs of the Senate in order to respect her desire to be apolitical..."

In July, Mrs. Arroyo offered the foreign affairs portfolio to then senator Blas Ople, a member of the LDP, to the consternation of her allies.

First Gentleman Jose Miguel Arroyo later explained the move was in line with the President’s policy of bipartisanship, which Mrs. Arroyo’s described as "new politics."