Walden Bello and Butch Abad: A waste of fire

“Fire Abad, ally urges P-Noy,” was a recent banner story of the country’s leading broadsheet. 

The headline story refers to Akbayan Representative Walden Bello’s letter addressed to PNoy, asking for the resignation of Budget Secretary Butch Abad, as well as Agrarian Reform Secretary Gil de los Reyes.

The headline shocked, but I thought either the Inquirer or Walden was playing with “fire.” The verb “fire” has different meanings. Perhaps Walden meant he wanted to set Butch on fire, that is, to boost and invigorate the beleaguered Secretary in the face of relentless attacks. 

After all, Walden and Butch have nice things in common. Both of them are Blue Eagles, and the expectation is they would have cheered each other: “One big fight!”  

More importantly, they share the same values and worldview: on equality, social justice, freedom, and democracy. They fought the Marcos dictatorship in a revolutionary way, and their current politics is consistent with their history of progressive activism. That one is associated with nat-dem and the other with the rival soc-dem does not matter. Both of them cannot be pigeonholed. 

Now, both are working within the system to change the system. It is apt to call them radical reformers. 

It is thus surprising that Walden wants PNoy to dismiss Butch. Not that we expect Walden and Butch to be always in agreement. Disagreements are okay. But disagreements between them are ideally settled through reconciling ways. To quote Walden’s letter to PNoy: “We have had our differences, of course, but these were differences between partners that shared the same goal of comprehensive reform.”

‘Severe error’

Yet in the letter to PNoy, Walden said he “cannot defend the continued presence of Mr. Florencio Abad in your Cabinet as Secretary of the Budget.” Walden contends that Abad “committed a severe error of judgment in his liberal deployment and redeployment of funds appropriated for specific purposes by Congress. The congressional power of the purse is one of the key checks on the Executive, and Secretary Abad should have had a sense that his fast and loose manipulation of funds, with no sense of limits, might have involved a violation of the principle of the separation of powers. At the very least, his acts smacked of recklessness.”

The gravity of Walden’s criticism lies in his claim that Butch concealed the existence of DAP (Disbursement Acceleration Program). Whoever gave Walden such info was careless. Butch, the champion of open government in the PNoy Cabinet, would not risk his reputation by hiding DAP. One merely has to do a Google search to check the public statements and stories on DAP since its introduction in the last quarter of 2011.

This is not the occasion to repeat the debate on the DAP. Elsewhere, for instance in a recent piece for Rappler, I wrote: The DAP “is a tool for efficiency and good governance, it is economically sound, and it has legal legs, only to be struck down by a rigid yet populist Supreme Court.” On the legal side, a good reading of the General Appropriations Act and Sections 38 and 39 of the Revised Administrative Code justifies the DAP.

That said, we, or Walden and Butch, can agree to disagree. But again, a serious policy disagreement between allies, no matter how serious, is resolved not through the dismissal – or in the parlance of the Left, the purging – of one. In addition, Walden himself rejects the accusation of “some critics of the administration that there was ill intent and malice on the part of Secretary Abad.”

Nevertheless, what for Walden is recklessness on Butch’s part is for others an act of boldness. And such bold innovation is what we expect from radical reformers. 

I wish Walden would empathize with Butch. Walden’s colorful history has been punctuated by similarly harsh charges. We surmise that his opponents treated his fiery Development Debacle or his militant resistance to the World Trade Organization as “reckless.” But his followers, me included, applauded such valor.

It is a pity that Walden’s letter was about asking PNoy to dismiss Abad and De los Reyes. Surely, the politically acute Walden knew at the outset that PNoy would reject his demand. In that light, his plea to PNoy became a wasted opportunity.

Obviously the President listens to Walden, thus their meeting on this sensitive matter. Sadly, the political capital Walden enjoys was not put to good use. It could have paid dividends if he opted to deploy his political capital to advance his pet reforms like freedom of information and industrial policy. Sayang. – Rappler.com

The author, the coordinator of Action for Economic Reforms, is a fan of both Walden Bello and Butch Abad.