[Reuters]

Published date: 28th Jul 1989

28 July 1988

Reuters News

English

(c) 1988 Reuters Limited

MANILA, July 28, Reuter – Philippine President Corazon Aquino, secure in power near the end of a coup-free year, is trying to get tough with her problems.

“The president feels she has to use some form of brass knuckles now where she was all sweetness before,” her spokesman, Teodoro Benigno, said on Wednesday.

An Asian diplomat who has followed closely Aquino’s 29 months in power said she was clearly tiring of missed targets, spiralling crime and unchecked corruption.

But she has gone nearly 12 months since rebellious military or elements loyal to deposed president Ferdinand Marcos have tried to usurp her. There have been five attempted coups, the most recent in August, last year.

Aquino, leader of a nation whose dozens of evening television talk-show hosts have created a “10.30 Club” to debate among themselves, is also clearly weary of chatter.

Taking stock in a speech to Congress on Tuesday, Aquino said: “We have too often descended to mutual abuse, suspicion and recrimination in our political life… A lot has been done but it has barely scratched the surface of the problems.”

During the past week, Aquino has bac ed her negotiators’ tough line in drawing up a new agreement on the U.S. bases in the Philippines, which led to a breakdown of talks on Tuesday, and told off critics who said her nationalism rested on whether the bases were removed.

She has ordered her lawmen, often accused of lawlessness themselves, to “arrest, not abet, this slide into criminal anarchy” and warned them she would dismiss those found wanting.

She has also told her cabinet to shape up or ship out.

At an unusually brief 90-minute cabinet meeting on Wednesday, ministers were bluntly told that development projects were badly behind schedule and causing “widespread disenchantment … erosion of government credibility (and) weakening of presidential authority”.

Newspaper publisher Joaquin Roces, who led a nationwide campaign to get Aquino to run for president in 1986, told her on Tuesday that the bottom line for Filipinos was that she must be “the exact opposite” of Marcos.

“We cannot afford a government of thieves unless we can tolerate a nation of highwaymen,” he said at a ceremony at which Aquino awarded him with the Legion of Honour.

A government “primer” issued this week said graft and corruption “do exist in the Philippines as anywhere also in lesser or greater degrees” but that Aquino herself, her family and her cabinet had never been accused of graft.

Political analysts noted that the Presidential Commission on Good Government, set up to hunt Illegal wealth accumulated by Marcos and his associates, was being stripped of Its sweeping powers to seize assets amid allegations that its officials themselves were tainted by corruption.

But Immigration Commissioner Miriam Santiago, widely praised for launching a ruthless drive to clean her department of graft, has been forced to slow down because she now has to route all decisions through the Justice Department.

Manila Chronicle columnist Amando Doronila said Aquino’s speech to Congress set no bold agenda for the future and “launched us into an era of the Great Plod”.

“The presidential style of leadership is cautious, even faltering at the start, and plodding … but it has somehow moved us forward,” Doronila said.