Urgent matters for the Fourteenth Congress
Ma. Isabel OngpinHope springs eternal and we must never give up on our legislators. Now that the last senator has been proclaimed and the congressmen are ready to elect the speaker, may we gently remind both houses and their occupants that we need some work from them in the form of urgent legislation that this country has to have in order to move forward.
The first is the modernization of the electoral process. If it means automation as we all expect, then please get some IT experts from the private and public sector and let them advise and explain the simplest, least extravagant, most commonsensical way to have it in place by 2010 and then draft it into a manageable, enforceable law. That would mean they should start now to have the time as well as the energy to study and debate how it should be done in the best way. The rushed legislation of the past regarding modernizing the electoral process has come too late, and has been too controversial. And they have not worked. Our hopes went up and were cruelly dashed. Let us not stay in the Stone Age regarding electoral processes.
It is just too perilous as well as disgraceful to take more than two months to declare who has been elected and who has not. The window of opportunity for mischief and malice is wide open to cause distrust and disbelief in the results. Elections are supposed to show who has a mandate to govern and who does not from the indisputable results. Unfortunately, the counting and the summing up is the subject of innumerable disputes from the length of the time lag between voting, counting and proclaiming the winners. As our voting population rises, our antediluvian electoral process demands superhuman effort and endurance which teachers and the Commission on Elections, who are drafted to monitor it, are hard put to have.
The second is the cheap medicine bill which Sen. Mar Roxas has refiled in the Senate. The two Congress members who are promoting the cheap medicine bill have also made noises that they are redoubling their efforts to file it and get it passed. We all know there is a lobby working hard to stymie the cheap medicine bill particularly in the lower House. The media should be on the alert and expose the goings-on, such as shameless obstacles and dissembling moves that will in effect render the whole exercise useless. This is a matter of life and death for a large number of us and should be treated with the utmost seriousness and speed.
The third is the anti-billboard bill which Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago has recently re-filed after getting nowhere in the Lower House. After one death, numerous instances of public nuisance and danger, the anti-billboard bill has been taken seriously only by a handful of legislators. Public opinion and widespread fury versus the billboards is quite visible and intense but some congress people seem to be deaf, dumb and blind to it while perhaps being too understanding of the billboard profiteers who are sure to offer incentives for the legislature. Our landscape, our safety and our aesthetic values are threatened by these overreaching and unscrupulous profit-driven elements in our society. They should be controlled and sanctioned for the good of all.
I am sure there are many more legislative initiatives that need to be put in place but I certify the above as the most urgent. Note that all of them have been attempted and failed before. We appeal to the legislators to please succeed this time.
