(Eagle News)–Insufferable.
This was how Senator Leila de Lima described President Rodrigo Duterte’s fourth State of the Nation Address on Monday, July 22.
In a statement, De Lima said in the first place, one does not fight corruption by “whining, complaining, and crying out to the plunderers to stop their corruption,” or by reinstating the death penalty.
“Definitely, it is not achieved by converting the Coco Levy fund into pork barrel for the legislators’ consumption instead of returning it to the farmers from whose sweat it came,” she said.
According to De Lima, corruption is stopped by “prosecuting and jailing thieves in government, instead of freeing them” so even if Duterte “forces a hundred public officials to resign, if he does not prosecute and jail a single one, it will not stop corruption.”
“Neither does sending 60 corrupt Customs officials to Congress,” she said.
As for an independent foreign policy, De Lima said this “is not achieved by being China’s lapdog.”
She said “no amount of extensive narration of how Duterte’s dialogue with Xi Jinping convinced him to surrender and sue for peace – even before anything close to a war is declared – can justify his capitulation and treason.”
“Like your SONA, a jumble of self-contradicting statements patched together to come up with a tortuous and grueling litany of excuses, it seems you would be crawling and gasping your way through the rest of your term,” De Lima said.
“The whole country cannot be sacrificed as you merely intend to survive the next three years, without any hope and without a concrete vision of the future for the Filipinos,” she added.
