It really wasn't a great SONA

It was the Philippine STAR’s 34th anniversary last Tuesday, and woe is me as I failed to mention it in my Tuesday column. I guess, my mind was just too anxious on what to write on my expectations about the 5th State of the Nation Address (SONA) of Pres. Rodrigo Duterte. So before I make my comments on the President’s SONA, allow me first to congratulate the men and women of the Star Group of Companies, the Philippine STAR and our president Miguel Belmonte.

If as a journalist I am as old as the Philippine STAR, it is only because after the EDSA Revolution I was the vice president external of the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry Inc. The board decided to write a letter inviting Inquirer columnist Maximo V. Soliven to be our speaker in our biggest conference in Cebu City at the time that we had a new president, Cory C. Aquino. Cebuanos wanted to know from Sir Max what to expect under the new administration after many years of Marcos rule. The conference was slated in the last week of July that year. Many Chamber members read the columns of Max Soliven in Mr. & Ms. and later with the PDI, which was known as the major critic of the Marcoses.

Since I had already met Sir Max Soliven when he was our guest at the Rotary Club of Cebu a year earlier, I was asked to meet him at the Mactan Alternate International Airport. When I got to the airport I proceeded to the Tarmac (security wasn’t like what it is today). I was just at the door of the plane and he asked me to handle the newspapers he was carrying so I took hold of the newspapers so he could go down the plane with ease.

When I took a peek at the newspapers he was carrying, it was a huge surprise for me that he wasn’t bringing the Philippine Daily Inquirer but a bunch of new newspapers called The Philippine STAR. In the car Sir Max told me that he and Betty Go-Belmonte and Art Borjal had left PDI and created The Philippine STAR. Here I was meeting Sir Max Soliven whom we invited to the CCCI Conference as PDI columnist and he arrived as the publisher of The Philippine STAR. At that time, Sir Max assigned me as his “Alikabok” in Cebu and later made me bureau chief of the Philippine STAR. But he asked me to write a column in The Freeman who invited me to write for them. A year later Sir Max asked me to visit Ma’am Betty Go-Belmonte who interviewed me to write columns for the STAR’s Good News section. Thirty-four years later, the rest is history! Kudos to The STAR!

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As expected, the schedule for the SONA at 2 p.m. started at 4 p.m. and was clocked at one hour and 46 minutes long. What actually made it so long was Pres. Duterte’s making comments after discussing what was written in his prepared SONA.

My faithful readers want to know what I felt about the President’s SONA. To be frank about it I expected a lot more from the President. However he talked a lot, but did not really give us the road to recovery in this new normal, so it was for me a disappointing SONA. For instance, the President failed to talk about his campaign promise to shift this nation into a federal form of government. He totally ignored it… therefore many of us federalists believe that there won’t be any Charter changes in the last years of the Duterte presidency.

Another major issue the President mentioned was the revival of the Death Penalty Bill. In fairness to Pres. Duterte he has been consistent about wanting to bring back the death penalty. He has reiterated this plea in previous SONAs, often mentioning the subject alongside his campaign against illegal drugs. I’m a conservative Catholic, I’m totally against this bill.

Then the President sort of warned both telecommunications giants Globe and Smart to shape up by December or something will happen. We know for a fact that the Philippines only have a total of 17,000 cell sites that serves its 76 million clientele. This means that our ratio is 4,000 users per cell site. I know for a fact that Globe Telecom has earmarked some 1,000 new cell sites per year. Unfortunately, Globe Telecom could hardly achieve even half that number due to the fact that local government units (LGUs) require 36 permits per cell site tower.

So in fairness to the telecom industry the lack of cell sites boils to the fact that LGUs have presented a difficult bureaucracy when it comes to building more cell site towers. If he truly wants to solve this problem, then he should order all LGUs to cut its bureaucratic red tape in half.

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