Marcos wants to hold separate SONA for stakeholders —Zubiri

President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. is looking into holding a separate State of the Nation Address (SONA) with various stakeholders, Senate President Juan Miguel Zubiri bared Tuesday. 

In a television interview, Zubiri said two Cabinet secretaries have informed him about this plan which was mentioned by the president in his recent meeting with the department and agency heads.

"If I’m not mistaken, he wants to have another SONA for the stakeholders. I didn't ask him that personally, but I spoke to two secretaries and he had this idea in Malacañang in one of the Cabinet meetings,” Zubiri said in an ANC interview.

“He wants to do another one with a full Cabinet slate on stage and discuss it to the different sectors, in the foreign chambers, in all industries concerned, and he wants to lay it out one by one how he wants to do it,” he added.

Corruption, drugs

Zubiri, who ran under the slate of Marcos and Vice President Sara Duterte in the 2022 elections, also defended the president for not mentioning his administration's anti-corruption and anti-drug campaign.

He said Marcos' speech included corruption issues by noting the tax leakages and the ease of doing business.

“You don’t have to say we’re going to strengthen the anti-corruption program. He said it in his speech if you listened carefully. He said that he wanted to plug the tax leakages. Tax leakages are through either inefficiency of tax collection or corruption or both,” Zubiri said.

“Ease of doing business is another way of saying we strengthen our anti-corruption policy. So he touched on it and I was quite appreciative of it. For me, it was quite a comprehensive speech,” Zubiri, one of the authors of the Ease of Doing Business Law, added.

On the war on drugs, Zubiri argued that each administration has its own set of priorities and Marcos has enumerated his own agenda which focused on agriculture, sound fiscal policy, among others.

"Each administration has their focus and priority. The last six years under Tatay Digong Duterte, almost all his SONAs were focused on the war on drugs, on anti corruption, on peace and order, public order and safety. There is one SONA where [former] President Duterte spoke about the war on drugs for two and a half hours," he noted.

"So, I believe the president would like to focus on other [issues that] he feels equally important. Topics to be able to come up with a better economy for our people and focus on poverty eradication, single-digit poverty rates, educating our children," he added.

In an interview Monday, Senator Risa Hontiveros pointed out that Marcos has not provided explicit details on how his administration will eradicate corruption in the bureaucracy.

"Dahil mga big-ticket programs ito, ito'y may potensyal pa rin para sa korapsyon na dapat bantayan. That's one possibility na missed sa SONA ni presidente, tungkol sana sa anti-corruption given 'yung history ng plunder sa ating bansa noong mga nakaraang dekada," she said.

(Because these are big-ticket programs, these have potential for corruption which should be monitored. That's one possibility that was missed in the SONA of the president, about anti-corruption given the history of plunder in the country in the past decades.) —KG, GMA News