In this country of instant rent-a-crowd assemblies and other meticulously, cynically stage-managed events, it was something nobody had seen in a long, long while.
All along the motorcade’s route, people lined up along the roadsides, crowded windows of buildings and even jostled for space on those precariously built and garishly painted pedestrian overpasses built by Bayani Fernando. And nobody paid them anything or ordered them, on pain of losing their jobs, homes or scholarships, to be there.
And it wasn’t a visiting pope or some scantily-clad film festival stars that they went to see. It was a prizefighter from General Santos City, the hero of the hour, Manny Pacquiao.
Like no one in recent memory, the Pacman has captured the imagination of his countrymen. Even the self-serving ululations of the various politicians who have latched on the boxer like so many barnacles on a docked ship — and who were constantly beside him during Friday’s motorcade — did not diminish the adulation one bit.
This early, some people are predicting a political career for Pacquiao — as if making the shift to politics was something like moving to a different weight division for the man. If that were not as fraught with the possibility of disaster for Pacquiao himself and the country that adores him, maybe we would join in making that suggestion.
And so we won’t.
Of course, we’ve had sports heroes who became politicians — just as we’ve had comedians, media personalities and other celebrities who have capitalized on mere name recall to get elected to high national office. The fact that so many of them were never heard from again afterwards is not likely to stop the trend of converting national recognition into political capital.
If Pacquiao did get into the political ring, he could just be as unstoppable as he is now in a real boxing arena. But that doesn’t make it right, not by a long, long shot.
Right now, of course, there seems to be very little danger of Pacquiao turning pro in the political sense — there’s just too much money still to be made and a lot more adulation (not just in this country) for him to reap as long as he keeps wearing his Mexican-made boxing gloves.
Who knows? Perhaps Pacquiao will show the same unerring brilliance he has displayed over the years in the ring and spare us all the prospect of a Senator (or even President) Pacman some years from now.
But one never really can tell. In the meantime, let’s all praise Manny Pacquiao. And hope he stays sane and refuses to get into politics simply because he can win big there, as well.
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Electricity distribution giant Manila Electric Co. seems to have been upheld by the Bureau of Internal Revenue, which has refused to act on a complaint to collect billions of pesos in unpaid taxes from the power company.
Meralco officials have maintained that the alleged tax deficiency is part of a concerted effort to further discredit the Lopez-owned firm in the wake of reports of a planned government takeover. The private complainant in the case alleged that the deficiency represented additional taxes imposed on Meralco as a result of the implementation of the expanded value-added tax law.
But in the period covered in the complaint, company officials say, the E-VAT law wasn’t even in effect yet. And the BIR, by refusing to act on the complaint, seems to agree.
The company’s officials say the conspiracy against Meralco is also evident in the effort to get approval for a questionable presidential executive order that creates a so-called energy “superbody.” Executive Order 474 creating the Philippine Strategic Oil, Gas, Energy Resources and Power Infrastructure Office will render inutile agencies like the Department of Energy, the Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management Corp. and the National Transmission Corp., and possibly also negate the policies already set down by the Epira law and other legislation on the power sector.
The real bad guy in the power-sector power play, according to Meralco, is the state-owned National Power Corp., which had also been reported earlier as the agency that was about to take over the private distribution firm — never mind if Napocor was so insolvent that it is single biggest cause of the escalating deficit and public-sector debt.
Later on, Meralco and Napocor decided to settle the issue of the reported P42 billion debt, after the Lopez company divulged numerous violations by Napocor of the agreement that it got the private company to sign so that the state firm could secure a World Bank loan.
For most people, the long-running squabble in the power sector would be just another corporate battle — if all of us power consumers weren’t getting caught in the middle by being forced to pay higher and higher rates.
There, unfortunately, lies the rub.
