MANILA, Philippines — President Duterte shrugged off the recommendations of Vice President Leni Robredo on how to deal with the war on drugs following her short stint as co-chairperson of the Inter-agency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs (ICAD).
Speaking to reporters yesterday, Duterte advised Robredo to revisit her ?“record.”
“You know, for all of these years she has done nothing. She is a colossal blunder. Colossal blunder,” he said.
“You know, I hate to say this, but how many voters are there in the Philippines? And you just do away with the 200,000-plus that she got over Marcos. It was really a mistake. With a slim margin and you talk big,” Duterte said.
He was referring to Robredo’s victory in the 2016 elections where she won by at least 200,000 votes against Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
Duterte previously said Robredo does not possess the capability to succeed him in office.
Yesterday he slammed Robredo for lecturing him on how to handle the drug war.
“She can’t lecture me on what to do. She has been there how many days? Seventeen or 18 days,” he said.
Robredo headed the government’s anti-drug body for only 18 days.
On the Vice President’s call to place the ICAD under the Dangerous Drugs Board (DDB), Duterte said Robredo can implement her own recommendations “if she becomes president.”
Go, Año hit back at Leni
The Filipino people should be the one to judge whether President Duterte’s war on drugs is a failure or not, Sen. Christopher Go said.
Go made the statement after Robredo graded the administration’s campaign against illegal drugs with a score of one percent in her report on her stint as ICAD co-chairperson last year.
“It’s the ordinary citizens who are benefitting (from the anti-drug campaign) because they’re the ones who say they feel safer compared to the time of the previous administration,” he said.
Go said he believes Robredo’s rating has no basis, given the strides achieved by the government in its campaign against drugs.
“Between one person using her own computation giving a grade of one percent, and 79 percent of Filipinos who said they are satisfied with the anti-drug campaign, I will choose to believe the latter,” he said, referring to the results of Social Weather Stations survey last December.
Go emphasized that the war on drugs is a continuing effort, adding that “as long as the addicts, the drug lords, the greed for money is there, the supply of shabu in the country will not immediately disappear.”
He said if Robredo remained at ICAD, the drug supply would increase as “drug lords will not be afraid of her strategy.”
Interior Secretary Eduardo Año also fired back at Robredo.
Año said Robredo’s assessment of the drug war is just an opinion “bereft of logic.”
“Whoever made her materials, that’s actually bereft of logic,” he said.
Año slammed Robredo for basing her assessment on the study of the Philippine National Police Drug Enforcement Group (PNP-DEG), which said that approximately 3,000 kilos of shabu worth P25 billion are consumed in the country per week, a small figure compared to the 1,344.87 kilos of shabu confiscated by the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA).
“It’s like counting the chickens before the eggs are hatched,” he said.
Año said the Vice President only used working data, which is not the actual situation on the ground.
“If 3,000 kilos of shabu are used per week, if it}s that much maybe we’re all using,” he said.
PDEA director general Aaron Aquino also scored Robredo for her assessment of the drug war, which he said was based on a “wild assumption.”
The PNP said Robredo was wrong in her assessment, adding she ignored the achievements of the police in the past three years.
“With all due respect, I beg to disagree with the public relations bombshell of Vice President Robredo that the anti-drug campaign was a massive failure,” PNP officer-in-charge Lt. Gen. Archie Francisco Gamboa said at a press briefing at Camp Crame in Quezon City.
According to Gamboa, Robredo made a mistake when she used figures from the DEG, which he described as a theoretical assumption.
Unified data on drug users
The DDB will come out with unified data on the number of drug users in the first semester of the year as it rejected Robredo’s proposal for the DDB to chair the ICAD.
The DDB stressed the importance of having a unified data and scientific basis in the implementation of the government’s policies and programs.
The agency is conducting the data gathering together with the Department of Social Welfare and Development to determine the extent of drug use in the country.
President Duterte previously said there were about seven to eight million drug users in the country, way above the 1.8 million in a survey conducted by the DDB in 2015.