All the wrong moves

“Robredo did not bother to determine the parameters and requisite expectations of her appointment albeit she knew hers was an unprecedented position.

If ever there was doubt that Rodrigo Duterte was merely joking, and out a fit of exasperation with one of the most unproductive albeit high maintenance P20 billion factotums within the Executive department, then all doubts have been erased with his appointment of Leonor Robredo to the Inter-Agency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs (ICAD).

The anti-narcotics advocacy remains Duterte’s principal program and is perhaps his most consistently lauded. To entrust this to a person of unproven competence and understanding, and strangely, one with proven disloyalties to the people’s agenda cannot simply be the subject of an off-the-cuff joke.

From the time she stepped into the limelight Robredo has always been the product of either an accident or political strings and machinations.

From square one, the Liberal Party (LP) has been using her. She has a manufactured persona, vicarious at best, mostly mutated out of another’s. That she was thrust as the LP’s vice-presidential candidate was compelled by a rejection. That she now sits as Vice President was due to machinations. Neither competence nor merit seemed to have played major roles in those decisions. The same holds true today.

The difference is that behind this latest challenge is Duterte. But the differences do not end there. His campaign has the backing of nine out of 10 Filipinos who consider it a success despite the pronouncements of Duterte himself that it isn’t. The disparity is a matter of goals and standards. Intellectually challenged pundits fail to discern that when they quote Duterte’s personal assessment against the survey numbers.

Our initial position was to support the presidential initiative and have her take the opportunity to show she deserves the billions taxpayers plow into her office.

Given her forgettable housing assignment, all things considered, this is the first time she’s been offered to be a major cog in this administration.

Initially Robredo hemmed and hawed. In “monkey-see, monkey-do” fashion, so did her closest hangers-on mimic her without thinking, albeit with venom and vitriol. Her advisers noted the position offered did not exist in the ICAD plantilla.

Such profundity. With eyes bulging, nostrils flaring open and fuming, unstoppable mouths almost frothing and spewing, and eyebrows waving wildly like unrestrained clothesline linen caught in a violent cyclone, shrieking like screaming banshees, her lackeys practically sucked the air out of the room and second-guessed her.

Lacking any real analytical skills relative to the President’s and unable to fathom the unfathomable combination of desperation and ambition of a newbie politician suddenly shoved into the blinding limelight, they guessed wrong.

Unfortunately their antics were not the only things wrong that ensued from Day One.

Robredo did not bother to determine the parameters and requisite expectations of her appointment albeit she knew hers was an unprecedented position. To this day she has not directly spoken to, much less coordinated with her appointing authority.

Upon her debut she quickly demanded an increase in the budget absent value-added game plans over the ongoing the public approves of overwhelmingly.

Rather than mend fences and build a consensus within ICAD and among linked agencies, she chose to bed with external critics and hostile opposition to the programs the public openly approves of. Immediately, that casts her on the opposite side of the administration’s constituencies.

On the misunderstood “Tokhang,” she quickly spoke without thinking and then backtracked.

Continuing to be annoying gadflies, her overly loquacious staff whose constant negativity has reached tempestuous proportions shows she is not in step with her own people. This raises red flags should confidential information released to her fall into their hands.

At best, Robredo’s maiden voyage as a truly productive member of the administration remains mixed and unfortunately continues to follow divisive partisanship lines. This is not what Duterte intended when he reached out to her.