Palace runs govt like a student council—Arroyo

RUNNING a government is not like leading a student council, Senator Joker Arroyo, the former executive secretary of President Benigno Aquino III’s mother, the late former President Corazon Aquino, said Sunday.

He made the statement as he deplored the “hits and misses” by Mr. Aquino’s top officials, as well as the decision by a committee that investigated the botched rescue attempt by police that resulted in eight Hong Kong hostages being killed on Aug. 23 in Manila, not to make public the results of its investigation here.

He described Malacañang’s budget allotments as “misaligned” and “lopsided,” and because it gave the Social Welfare Department a 123-percent increase in its allocation while the Judiciary, a co-equal government branch, again received less than 1 percent of the total.

Arroyo was particularly incensed by the committee’s decision to show the results of its investigation into the hostage crisis to the Chinese and Hong Kong governments first.

“That’s very strange,” he told dzBB radio.

“It’s as if they did the report for China’s consumption. It should be for the consumption of the Filipino people primarily.”

Arroyo said the report was made by an independent committee, hence nobody could touch it.

“[And] Why keep on talking about Hong Kong?” So that it will please Hong Kong? That’s not right,” Arroyo said.

“Malacañang runs the government like a student council. If some decision is wrong, they change it. What’s that? It’s a hit-and-miss situation, like Boys and Girls’ Week. There’s a boy mayor and a girl mayor.”

Arroyo said Malacañang’s officials should learn how to be effective.

“They should wake up. This is the real thing. This is no longer a student government,” he said.

“What’s happening is that we’re always the last to know. The Filipino public should know. We had nothing to do with that [hostage crisis].”