Roxas returns

Over a year into its administration, the divergent factions within Benigno Aquino III’s cackling gaggle of confidants, cabinet men, classmates, crushes and cabals still cannot get their act together. Too many conflicting interests and too many agendas. Too much politics also, resurfacing recently when a key ally resigned and a factotum was reportedly retained in exchange for congressional votes to scuttle statutory elections. At the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) a similar dilemma infests unchecked. Already, we’ve lost one of our most competent in exchange for retaining beyond reason and rationality a presidential protégé. Increasingly, the medium of exchange – cabinet positions – is depreciating faster than the double-recession dollar. In a single communications office there are Moe, Larry and Curly. At the Department of the Interior and Local Governments, factionalism literally contributed to a massacre. Innocent lives lost are thus far the highest price paid for managerial weaknesses. Dysfunctional factionalism evidences a slobbering lack of leadership. While constituencies might grudgingly forgive intellectual or emotional lapses, business cannot be as tolerant because blunders cost money. Without leadership, a mishmash of beasties, brainiacs and buffoons enter a vacuum and result in factionalism. There is one within Aquino’s muddled menagerie who the business community trusted might rise above the fray. DOTC Secretary Mar Roxas was to have been a no-nonsense manager. Incorruptible. Uncompromising. Headstrong and hardworking. He was to have been the lost leader we traded off when we accepted Aquino for as long as the latter did not steal from us. For sure, Roxas is not lazy. The beat he follows is his own. Of the president’s men, it is Roxas who understands business. In another life, I remember standing with him on a dark Quezon City curb, opposite a printing press. At an ungodly hour past midnight, we waited for the first copies of an investment prospectus we had worked on. I remember the hours invested, the financials crunched, the arguments, the lost tempers and the friendships re-won. To this day that public offering stands as one of the best capital-raising issues of the Philippine capital markets. I also remember sitting outside the boardroom of a major television network. It was way after office hours. We had no financial analysts, no one to flip the charts. All we had was a comprehensive capital infusion proposal to catalyze the network to the top rung. Lately, however, neck-deep in politics and light years from our investment banking days, Roxas now seems engulfed by politics’ corrosive culture of compromise. In at least two instances, the DOTC’s positions impact negatively on the sanctity of corporate contracts - a matter increasingly alarming to investors and critical to attracting much-needed capital for the Public-Private Partnership, which ironically, Roxas himself conceived. One is the continuing non-payment by a DOTC agency of liabilities owed. Aggravating this are issues of corruption, conspiracy and collusion. Another is the tanking of a foreign-funded state-of-the-art port facility junked on the basis of belated DOTC reports declaring it “superfluous”. It takes more than superfluity to void a contract. Moreover, a presidential economic review agency labeled DOTC’s report “deficient”. Risking credibility and expensive lawsuits, the disposition of both is at best tenuous. Few thought Roxas would fail these litmus tests. It seems we all need reality checks. Perhaps the demands of politics and party intrude excessively. As a party official, he serves constituencies who are more equal than others. Or maybe it is the distant call of a higher office echoing like a disembodied whisper that forces him to accept the vagaries of a factional administration that all too easily surrenders to trade-offs. What he is today after a failed bid for the presidency and the vice-presidency contrasts with promises buried but reborn when he took over from his late brother Dinggoy and from there rekindled other promises unfulfilled by the late, great Gerry Roxas. Mar Roxas stood taller than most. More than his presidential running mate, he was prepared for higher responsibilities, a journey derailed by the alchemy of unexpected circumstances and a coterie of circus ringmasters. His congressional record was sterling. Where others were grandstanders, Roxas had grand visions. Where others had political designs, Roxas had preordained destiny. Where statutes involved commerce and economics, his leadership shone in such issues as the expanded value added tax, the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement, the business outsourcing industry, cheaper medicines and the investigations into pension plan fraud. Figuratively, Roxas is the mythical lost son of Alexander in Kipling’s “The Man who would be King." Perhaps it is not too late to rekindle the torch Gerry Roxas had once lit.