Manny’s priorities

We had a long talk with Senate President Manuel Villar over coffee yesterday at the Tuesday Club in the EDSA Shangri-La. Villar said he was trying his best to get things moving in the Senate – through a kind of "diplomatic" approach rather than harsh debate or confrontation.

Manny spoke about the priority measures he would like his colleagues in the upper chamber (sometimes known as the Uppity Chamber) to approve – at long last. At the top of his list was the Bio-Fuel bill. With the global price of oil, as a result of war in the Middle East and other troubles in the oil-rich quarters of our planet, threatening to soar above $80 per barrel, it is urgent to explore and tap alternative sources of fuel.

Nowhere is this more urgent than the Philippines where our gas, indeed our mineral resources remain undeveloped, and our vehicles, industrial plants (the few we have), and other fossil-fuel and gas-fed enterprises may soon be running on empty. Frankly, I don’t see why we have lagged in the quest for alternatives to oil – since we have great potential not merely in geothermal, but in other sources, whether solar energy or wind-power.

One alternative is ethanol, which can be made from corn (as they’re unsuccessfully trying to do in the United States), but better from sugarcane, which used to be our premier agricultural export, next of course to abaca in which we remain the world leader. Sin cuota (meaning the US quota) our sugarcane industry initially floundered compelling the once-fabled Bacolod millionaires who used to live it up on crop mortgages one to three years in advance, to roll up their sleeves and earnestly get to work on something else. However, the sugar industry has rebounded. We enjoy self-sufficiency in sugar and could do more, given the right incentives.

After all, with generations of expertise, our sugar kingdoms can be great again. The key to this new prosperity – if we earnestly get going on it – is the fact that ethanol can be produced by the barrel from sugarcane. Look at Brazil, where (alas, it must be added), miles of rainforest have been felled for the burgeoning sugarcane plantations that enable for starters perhaps 40 percent of Brazil’s vehicles to be powered by ethanol or a mix of ethanol and gasoline.

The same can be said, parenthetically of our sleeping mineral resources which are untapped because efficient mining has never been rationally developed – and there is too much high-profile protest (led often by bishops and clergy) against the degredation of the natural environment. The Supreme Court recently confirmed the Mining Law, and we must implement a program of inviting mining firms and geological experts to explore our mineral wealth more aggressively. There is much to be dug up from the ground to feed and support our people in this nation where so many millions go to bed hungry and subsist beneath the poverty line.

As has been vividly put so often: We are a nation in rags, poor and despairing, sitting on a Mountain of Gold.

In any event, let’s see how our legislators handle this issue.

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Villar’s other priority, he said yesterday, is to push for the approval by the Senate of the long-stalled Anti-Terrorism bill. The House of Representatives passed its version many months ago, but the Senate version remains frozen, subject to endless debate over possible violations of human rights and other caveats.

"I wish I could say the Anti-Terrorism Law will be approved very soon," the new Senate President grinned, "but that’s been said so many times before that I won’t make any predictions." But he whispered, he believes that day will be "soon."

C’mon, guys. Give our soldiers and policemen the teeth with which to bite and swallow those ruthless terrorists, chew them up, and spit them out.

Right now, a military operation is ongoing in Indanan, Sulu, where two suspected "Bali bombers" (Jemaah Islamiyah "imports" from Malaysia and Indonesia) are being sought, along with their local connection, the Abu Sayyaf’s Janjalani. The "suspects" were spotted in Mindanao, no doubt bent on creating murderous mischief here – if, in truth, the mad-dog bombers "sighted" were the real thing. Yet, how can these bomb-making thugs and their homicidal associates be collared and kept in jail since our penal laws require their "release" in a matter of hours if no prima facie "evidence" is brought forth at once linking them to murder and "terrorism"? The captured terrorists will merely waltz out of prison, merrily thumbing their noses at us, while our military and police who risked their own lives and exerted tremendous effort to track them down look on, stupefied and disappointed.

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Finally, Villar said the Senate will be attempting to belatedly "approve" the 2006 Budget. This "resurrection" remains to be seen. This writer and many others believe that Budget has already been sunk deeper than the Titanic, but in this world wonders never cease.

One motive our Senators might have is the fact that a hold-over Budget (from the year 2005) might give La Presidenta too much discretion to fund her own projects right and left.

Let’s see if legally the 2006 budget can be called back from the "dead" like Lazarus was summoned back from the tomb. Our solons are, after all, nothing like our Lord Jesus, both Son of God and worker of Miracles. I won’t say of course , that any of them could resemble the two thieves between whom Our Lord was crucified on Calvary, the hill of Golgotha.

Speaking of the Budget, I was able to speak with newly-installed DepEd Secretary Jesli Lapus yesterday afternoon. Jing Lapus had been sworn in by the President at 10 a.m. before the rest of the Cabinet assembled. The Cabinet meeting, when La GMA and its members resumed their meeting, discussed not Education but the super-projects intended to create super-pockets of prosperity in the provinces, as outlined by La Presidenta in her State of the Nation Address (SONA).

However, Lapus still put a positive spin on GMA’s commitment to Education. The fact that, in the one-trillion pesos 2007 proposed budget submitted by Malacañang, Education had been allotted P134 billion, a jump of 30 percent over the P112 billion which had been earmarked for it in the 2005 Budget was deemed very significant by Lapus. The supplemental budget, moreover, the new DepEd Secretary pointed out, gives Education another P8.4 billion.

God luck, Jing, on your task: not merely to provide enough classrooms, retrain our public school teachers and enhance their performance, recruit and assign new teachers – in sum, bring Education up from its knees to stand erect and proud, injected with a strong dose of adrenalin.

Can super-Jesli accomplish this? He’s been a Miracle Man in banking, accounting, and business management. Transforming our creaky Education system might be a challenge to him almost as difficult as multiplying the loaves and the fishes on the Mountain of Beatitudes in Galilee.

One thing must be remarked of the Biblical stories. Sites which were recorded as bigger than life appear less lofty on closer inspection in the Holy Land. The Mount of Beatitudes, we found, was no higher than a hill, as was the Mount of Temptation. (Mount Hermon, naturally, capped by eternal snow, remained as towering as ever).

Even the Sea of Galilee (or the Lake of Kinnaret) on which Jesus performed his most popular miracles, such as calming the stormy waves, walking on water, or urging the fishermen-apostles to cast their empty nets after a disappointing night of empty-handed fishing, to suddenly find those nets straining with fish.

In the Bible, the Lake loomed so mightily, with huge and heaving waves, whipped up by strong winds, that in our childhood we had imagined it as vast as an ocean. Indeed, when one stands at its edge in Tiberias, the Lake looks like a sea, with the further shore almost beyond the horizon. Yet, when one ascend the Golan Heights (which the Israelis captured from Syria in the Six-day War), one can see the Lake of Galilee far below, appearing small in its entirety but as beautiful in repose as a shiny glass mirror embedded in a greenish-brown matrix.

The Mountain of Jesli Lapus’ challenges in the moribund, corruption-tinged DepEd, is however much more steep and daunting. He will have to heave-ho with all his might, while exercising, in contrast, all the qualities of a snake-charmer. How he deals with and, by golly, "converts" that nest of vipers which is the DepEd’s bureaucracy will be the lithmus test of his leadership and determination.

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Another very important agency which urgently needs reform is the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) – a department now involved in some controversy owing to the deterioration of nursing education. (Not to mention its investigation, along with the DepEd of a "leak" in the test questions of the last nursing board examination.)

I saw an item in the newspapers last Monday in which a ranking CHED official ranted that the older, established nursing schools are "at fault" for the deteriorating quality of nursing education in this country. The official alleged that the new nursing schools, so easily approved by the CHED I might point out, had yet to graduate "a sufficient number of students to make an impact on local nursing education." What a specious argument that was – the CHED trying to protect its own ass when, in truth, the mushrooming of substandard nursing schools designed to meet a huge demand for Filipino nurses abroad (in the US, Britain, and the Middle East, for instance) was abetted by the CHED which did not move decisively to close them down.

There are other suspicious manifestations which have been surfacing in the CHED under the management of its Chairman and CEO, Carlito Puno. The fact is that Puno should have been retired when his second term expired last Monday, but he had been temporarily extended by the President in a "hold-over" capacity until she found a replacement for him – or, at the urging of powerful politicians and his own lobbyists – granted him a new tenure of five years. Five years? Perish the thought. Let’s see a change in the CHED, for the good of education, and the improvement of our colleges and universities.

There are whispers, for example, about the technical cooperative program funded by foreign countries which grant aid to the Philippine government to enable us to send teachers abroad for advanced training. The rumor has become prevalent that an official there has been demanding a "Merry Christmas," or payment from each grantee in order for the hopeful teacher to get CHED’s stamp of approval. Another strange phenomenon is the CHED's alleged endorsement of a single publishing house, Trinitas Publications, to supply ALL state universities in return for a …uh, "handsome commission." Is this true?

Why has Chairman Puno not been able to deal with these purported irregularities which have assumed scandalous proportions? Instead of questioning these practices, President GMA recently gave Chairman Puno an allocation of P5 billion, to be farmed out to chosen state universities.

When all is said and done, Mr. Puno’s reappointment to a third term would, according to insiders, be very unfortunate.

Moreover, Carlito Puno’s brother, whose promotion this writer has heartily endorsed, Senior Associate Justice Reynato Puno may soon become the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, when Chief Justice Arturo Panganiban retires this December. I back Justice Puno for Chief Justice – and have done so volubly for a year already, owing to his probity, integrity and legal scholarships. Not so with brother Carlito.

It will be said (with "cousin" Ronnie Puno already Secretary of Interior and Local Government) that there are too many Punos in the GMA government – punong-puno na.

There is, of course, a "dark horse" being considered – newly-minted Commissioner Nenalyn Defensor, a sister of Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago. Susmariosep. We already have too many dynasties galore. Give us a break.