Boycott GMA’s State of the Nation Address (SONA)

President GMA can’t mega-bluff the real state of the country under her term. She has to stop these triumphal pretensions because the crisis on her legitimacy is not yet over. Since there is no reason why we should listen to GMA’s SONA, we will again join the protest rallies outside the House of Representatives.

Surrounding President GMA with celebrities and sports icons during the SONA won’t make her or her statements credible. Or geographic euphemisms won’t really mean better lives for Filipinos. Only truth and justice will make this government credible and only good governance will solve our poverty.

The real State of the Nation is this: more than 70% of Filipinos will not believe what President GMA has to say today. She can dismiss this as political noise for all she want, but unless questions on her legitimacy are resolved with credibility, her Presidency will always be deemed damaged by the public. Like the previous years, GMA’s policies and actions will always be dictated by her political survival at the expense of good governance.

She cut spending for social services to regulate the budget deficit in a desperate bid to lower the budget deficit and maintain access to credit. She has to dispense patronage and perks to her allies in Congress – in the form of Cha-cha and projects – to block the impeachment complaint.

Despite the reported coup attempt, she deliberately avoided implementing crucial security sector reforms, such as curbing corruption in the military, just to please the generals, whose loyalty she needs to remain in power. It is likewise unlikely that there’ll be any meaningful electoral reforms under her term, because that, too would mean ferreting out the truth behind the ‘Hello Garci’ tapes. What we will see increasingly is the curbing of civil liberties and the rampant violation of human rights to silence the opposition.

We have a damaged nation with a President too preoccupied buying off her survival and suppressing the truth to keep her head above water – that’s the real State of the Nation.