Roxas out of Palace but with an army

Now that defeated vice presidential candidate, former Sen. Manuel A. Roxas II, has accepted the position of secretary of transportation and communications, what happens to the plan to set up the Office of Chief of Staff that was intended to give him a powerful job, with Cabinet rank, in the Aquino administration? That innovation, which would have revamped the power structure in P-Noy’s Cabinet, now appears to be superfluous.

The question of what job to give Roxas to harness his political experience and expertise as an investment banker was an issue that had deeply divided administration followers in the division of spoils after the election of Noynoy Aquino to the presidency last May.

After so much hemming and hawing, and agonizing, P-Noy persuaded his running mate in the Liberal Party to accept a full-time Cabinet position, a pretty important portfolio that will certainly keep Roxas busy and in the public eye in the next five years.

Despite the promise dangled before Roxas that it would make him the “alter ego” of the President and the overall overseer of government across the spectrum of the entire executive department, the position of chief of staff (a stranger in the Philippines Cabinet structure) was really a fictional creature with empty powers. In the end, Roxas saw through the ruse: his rivals in the internal power struggle in the administration sought to create a hollow ministry with mainly advisory functions and a pompous title, supposedly with “Cabinet rank.” In the course of the preparation of the administrative order defining the functions and powers of the chief of staff to prevent an overlap and conflict with those of the executive secretary, the real plan was to make that office merely advisory, not executive, thereby making the chief of staff a mere figurehead with a glorified title. This was how vicious the machinations were inside Malacañang over the issue of what job to give Roxas—the subplot being that he was being groomed by a clique of presidential cronies to be a lame duck in the Aquino administration, doing nothing in the next five years and robbed of opportunities to rehabilitate himself from his unsuccessful run for the vice presidency.

It finally dawned on Roxas that if he wanted to deliver results, there was nothing better offered to him than the transportation and communications portfolio that was left vacant by the resignation of Secretary Jose de Jesus. The President was able to persuade Roxas to replace De Jesus with the appeal that the Department of Transportation and Communications was the largest line agency with projects running into billions of pesos. The President was not flattering Roxas when he said, the DOTC “is in charge of huge projects, big-ticket items that have been the milking cow of corrupt individuals in the past.” P-Noy said Roxas would also be a senior member of the economic development cluster, one of the five clusters into which the President has regrouped the Cabinet. In reality, despite the importance of the DOTC in economic development, Roxas is not the lead man of the development cluster; he is under Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima.

Roxas will now be in charge of a ministry with its own budget, staff, projects and offices away from Malacañang, autonomous of other departments. In a word, he will have an army and troops under his command, with specific missions and an order of battle. If he had been designated chief of staff, without specific functions, jurisdictions and troops to deploy, he would have been reduced into a general commanding a phantom army of paper divisions. The President had jobs cut out for Roxas —including resolving the problems stemming from the long-delayed full operations of the new Naia Terminal 3, and the investigation of the allegedly overpriced and over-building of roll-on-roll-off projects of the past administration.

The appointment of Roxas to the DOTC may have given him a full portfolio, but it effectively removes him from Malacañang, where he thought he would gain visibility in the center of the levers of power. But he need not be in Malacañang to be a successful and productive department head. De Jesus, during his term as transportation head, had only one meeting—outside the regular Cabinet meetings—with President Aquino inside the Palace, and he accomplished tangible results.

The assignment of Roxas to the DOTC is believed to have averted a head-on clash between a faction identified with Roxas (which is composed mainly of politicians of the Liberal Party, of which Roxas is president) and advisers and cronies of the President (including classmates and campaign supporters, and people sharing trivial interests with the President in such things as fast cars and guns). With Roxas shunted out of the Palace, there will be less chances of friction arising between Roxas and Executive Secretary Paquito Ochoa over jurisdictional issues.

But the President has left other cronyism-related issues unresolved. For instance, Roxas is left with the issue of what to do with suspended Land Transportation Office head Virginia Torres, who is due to return to her post. She took a leave of absence while a preliminary investigation was being conducted on a complaint of her alleged complicity in the failed takeover of Stradcom, the LTO’s technology supplier. The reported failure of Malacañang to push through the investigation of the case against Torres is believed to have triggered the resignation of De Jesus.

Torres is known as a shooting range crony of the President. How Roxas will handle this irritant is a test of how much he could tolerate cronyism. And we will find out, too, whether this would distract him from his main job.