BY the end of June, President Benigno Aquino III will become irrelevant. What he says afterward will matter very little, and people will no longer feel obliged to listen to him once he leaves office. The fawning that he may have grown accustomed to in the last six years will be directed instead at his successor. Whoever that turns out to be could also determine whether Mr. Aquino will be finally held accountable for his considerable sins while he was in office, as he loses his presidential immunity from suit. Life after retirement may not be as simple as Mr. Aquino hopes.
Given these rather unpleasant prospects, Mr. Aquino must have felt compelled to indulge himself in one more round of fulsome self congratulation.
Mr. Aquino, however, may have overstated matters when he described himself as the best president in Philippine history last week.
At a campaign stop in Cebu, the President said none of his predecessors—or even all the presidential candidates except for his chosen successor—could beat his administration in terms of solid achievements.
He said the country’s 6.2-percent annual average economic growth under his watch was last seen during the 1970s—then quickly cast doubt on those figures, presumably because they were achieved under martial law.
But statistics can be tricky. Under the last six years of Mr. Aquino’s predecessor, former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the Philippines managed to post an average annual growth of 5.3 percent, despite a global recession that the International Monetary Fund described as the worst general economic decline suffered by world markets since World War II. Mr. Aquino faced no similar challenge during his term. In fact, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that growth should have been even sharper had Mr. Aquino not held back billions of pesos in infrastructure spending because he was worried the money would be stolen.
Six years later, this paranoid approach to governance has taken its toll on an economy that is unable even to keep city trains running safely and on time. Small wonder that not one of Mr. Aquino’s flagship infrastructure projects has been completed in the last six years.
None of this, however, even touches on the damage that Mr. Aquino has done to the country’s democratic institutions.
The death of former chief justice of the Supreme Court Renato Corona last week was a tragic reminder of Mr. Aquino’s corruption of state institutions, including Congress and the justice system. It was Mr. Aquino, after all, who used billions of pesos in public funds to “convince” lawmakers to impeach, then convict Corona, whose true crime was to oppose Mr. Aquino’s wishes.
When it was convenient to do so, Mr. Aquino and his attack dogs have been all too willing to break the law to go after his political enemies.
The recent leaks of financial data of Mr. Aquino’s critics are just the latest example of state institutions—in this case, the Anti-Money Laundering Council—being used as a tool of political assassination, in violation of their own mandates. We have seen this pattern, too, at the Justice department, the Bureau of Internal Revenue and even the Office of the Ombudsman, which is supposed to be an independent constitutional agency.
Was Mr. Aquino really the best president the country ever had? Certainly—but only in his own mind.
