President Aquino, A Rare ‘Window of Opportunity’

President Aquino, despite some miscalculations on his part, is one president who offers a rare window of opportunity for us as a nation.

It is not a common occurrence in the history of our nation to get a President elected in office whose main goal in life is to clean up corruption and rebuild a nation.  Indeed President Aquino is a ‘rare commodity’ for the Philippines.  His honesty, his resolve to fight corruption and his sincerity indeed do set him apart from the rest.  He continues to lead under the flagship of integrity.  He is one of a kind.  It makes one wonder how long we may have to wait for another one like him after 2016.

It has been said that a leader will never rise above the limitations set by his character. 

In a nation plagued by an eternal culture of mismanagement and corruption, his coming to center stage indeed presents a long-awaited, much-deserved break by the Motherland.  His character has served as a rare unifier for a good number of people in the nation.  His character is the driving force behind his popularity.  It takes courage for anyone to take this challenge of corruption head-on. Corruption busting is not for the faint of heart.  His approach to governance is a major departure from past leaderships’ style to govern. I sense that a lot of us have yet to realize this and thus have not come to appreciate it and taken advantage of it.

The President is not perfect.  Despite all the pats on his back and his popularity, Noynoy is still learning the ropes as a leader.  He has made mistakes and he will make mistakes.  He will get criticized , ostracized, insulted.  He will make people mad even.  But all that come with positions in leadership.   They also indicate that he is doing his job.  

The nation and its citizenry will do well to fully take advantage of his being President. Six years is not very long in terms of nation building. But if everyone across the board gives his remaining five years-plus proper focus and prioritizing , we may just yet create that much needed momentum to reverse the tides of the ongoing devastation brought about by mismanagement and corruption and  give the next administration plenty of headway to carry us forward.  We need to do our utmost as citizens and leaders to establish our beachheads now where we can launch and re launch continued efforts later to persistently, consistently shore up what we have built so far. 

Nation building is not just for  leaders or the economists with MBA’s.  Nation building takes a whole nation throwing its weight behind a purpose, behind much needed goals. Noynoy’s presence in Malacanang is short-lived.  His declared purpose and goals have been stated with total clarity. His vision is clear. He wants to rebuild a nation.  We can choose to wrangle over issues, we can choose to pull each other down.  We can choose to set traps for one another. We can all continue to talk while no one listens. We can choose to create chaos versus order.  After five years of these, we will be where we started from or perhaps worse. We lose.

As people, we need to give wisdom and common sense a foothold and take charge of our future and give this nation a much needed break, a much awaited boost. We need not come up with new laws, we need no new techniques, no new Constitution, no new Bills.  We do need new attitudes, new resolve, new commitments to put our nation first before our own interests.  We need to fully put into action the laws that abound on paper but are dead on enforcement.  Adding more laws without learning to enforce existing ones first is senseless.  Lawmakers who boast of multiple bills submitted or passed are only kidding themselves. Law enforcement more than ‘lawmaking’ at a time such as ours makes more sense.   We need to bring order where chaos, mismanagement and corruption reign.  All these take a whole nation to accomplish.

So, while this very rare opportunity at unity sits before all of us, this very rare chance that may not come our way again for decades,  we have this burden on our hands to make the right decision.  One wise guy once said, ‘I would rather attempt to do something great and fail, than to attempt to do nothing and succeed’ ….. in doing nothing. 

In my years of observing our Asian neighbors and their inherent ability to unite and prosper,  I can’t help but get reminded how miserably we fail to do the same.  Progress has been illusive for the Philippines for the most part.  I look at this failure to unite, our inability to move as one,  as yet another huge hurdle that we need to master and control if we are going to rise up as a nation.

I look at the sitting President as a very rare opportunity indeed. We can choose to rally behind him or we can choose to ignore him or kill his efforts.  It has been said that one’s results wholly depend upon those things that he does continuously,  consistently and persistently.  What we do now will define what will become of our nation tomorrow.  We choose our results.  Both failure and success are inside jobs, so I’ve heard.

Joe Joson

USA