By Robert B. Roque, Jr.
The President has taken the Department of Agriculture by the horns, and the whole country expected him to rear it in the right direction. Farmers, at least, thought they’d see an end to the smuggling of agricultural products that kill them in the market.
Well, last week – as in previous weeks since BBM wore the hat of Agriculture Secretary – Customs officers in the Port of Subic intercepted a shipment brought in by Veneta Goods Trading and declared it as assorted foodstuffs but actually contained frozen carrots. A separate shipment, consigned to Lalavy Aggregates Trading, was declared as lobster balls and crabsticks but were, in fact, fresh red and white onions.
My question, Mr. President, is: When will you quit talking about intercepting these shipments and actually muscle up and throw these obviously well-connected, daring, and moneyed smugglers in jail? Or did you grab this bull-sized task just to blow your own horn?
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Vice President Sara Duterte is vocal about putting her full weight behind the return of military training in tertiary-level education. By their political nature, her administration allies in Congress are now railroading the passage of a bill that brings back the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps or ROTC.
Of course, this grand orchestra of legislators under her baton are renaming it as the proposed “National Citizens Service Training (NCST) Program Act.” But in essence, it is what it is – the same ROTC that was rejected by the nation years ago when poor ROTC cadet Mark Welson Chua of the University of Santo Tomas (UST) ended up dead in Pasig River for exposing how deeply embedded corruption was in the corps.
Gabriela party-list Rep. Arlene Brosas, who leads a small pack of progressive lawmakers, are pushing back to prevent the return of the “culture of violence, impunity, and corruption that they (proponents of the bill) want to be inculcated in the minds of the youth.”
For me, the National Service Training Program (NSTP) is still the best course to be made mandatory in college, not the ROTC or whatever sanitized name they want to call it. The NSTP teaches the student to do good through community service, through helping people. To me, that beats marching in boots with the skills for war all the time.
It also beats the argument of preparing our citizens to defend our country against possible invaders. That would be an entirely false premise that’s dangerous to plant in our young citizens’ minds, especially if the enemy we’re preparing for is China. Love for country begins in the community. We don’t need to look so far beyond the South China Sea to show it.
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