LETTERS FROM DAVAO: Leni, how could you?

I don’t know what got into the brains of VP Leni Robredo. She is missing a lot of opportunities to prove she can lead. Given an important Housing portfolio that would have endeared her to the mass base, she squandered her time and opportunity by traveling in the US and cavort with a cabal of anti-Duterte mafia instead.

She must have thought that nobody would know this at home but she forgot that walls have ears and her façade of conviviality with the Duterte administration ended as quickly as she was named the housing czarina.

Duterte,, true to form, does not want to pick a fight with a woman. He was civil with her and up till now he would always dismiss the perorations of Leni Robredo as part of her freedom.

But if Duterte has patience over the indiscretion of Leni, some quarters are not actually pleased with what she is doing. She has this penchant to invent issues and the stomach to take all the lies that perjured senate witnesses had been dishing out.

One of the latest idiocy she committed was her warped interpretation of the police intelligence lingo “palit-ulo”. She painstakingly explain to the world community that “palit-ulo” is a police abuse of arresting a relative in lieu of a drug suspect who is at large.

Sadly top cop Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa has to reveal an important strategy they have in their quarry for the big fish in the drug industry. “Palit-ulo”, he explained, is trading lesser penalty for an arrested drug offender provided he confesses who and where are the sources of drugs the suspect peddles.

VP Robredo did not only succeed in besmirching the image of the country many trade opportunities and investments are now jeopardized. Others call this treachery but as Duterte said, you cannot gag her. Indeed it was a wise counsel for her to be excluded in cabinet meetings. You cannot afford to have an enemy right inside your corral.

Leni is a sucker for publicity and she wants it in a grand arena like a United Nations forums. She reads from an idiot board and she sounded just like detained Sen. Leila De Lima and the lying witnesses in the Senate hall.

In the meantime, Pres. Rodrigo Duterte is busy building new bridges for trade and commerce among ASEAN nations. His peacemakers led by Sec. Jesus Dureza and Sec. Bebot Bello are on the job running. Sec. Sony Dominguez is keeping up with the demands of the time – seeing to it that bilateral trade and financial agreements be accomplished and for projects implementations to follow.

Where is Vice President Leni Robredo while everybody is busy? She is in a video recording room pleasantly doing her job at diminishing and demolishing what the Duterte government is doing for the country.

Leni, how could you? (Mr. Jun Ledesma is a community journalist who writes from Davao City and comments from the perspective of a Mindanaoan)