HE is a large man with a booming voice and he carries a big stick. Who else would dare ask Congress for emergency powers to solve the transportation and traffic crisis?
But not in a hundred days! “Am I crazy, am I such a fool to think I can make traffic disappear in three months?”
For all the mammoth infrastructures and programs lined up in a 64-page report submitted to the Senate, Transportation Secretary Arturo Tugade laments that “we see shadows even when there is no sun,” his own metaphor momentarily cooling him down.
One of those shadows is the suspicion cast on his undersecretaries, of whom only one was an executive of Ayala, although all three have been shoved under a cloud of suspicion for allegedly planning to favor Ayala in some of the P7 trillion projects.
“Why do we need emergency powers?” The coffee is cooling in front of him. “One luxury we do not have is time.”
Most of the time, Secretary Tugade, who describes himself as a logistician – the family business includes trucking, logistics, fuel distribution, travel, fashion – walks with a swagger and talks like a cowboy itching for a brawl.
After more than two hours of Q&A, he comes off as a knockout, what a character!
Fearless, ferocious, and loudly flammable, the man can burn you with his impatience to solve any and all problems thrown at him. He grew up in tough neighborhoods in Tatalon, QC, and beside an estero in Sampaloc. From grade one he was seemingly handpicked by God in the person of San Beda’s venerable Fr. Benigno Benabarre, OSB, now 102 years old, who gave him the gift of education all the way to law school, where he would be a classmate of a certain Rodrigo Duterte. The two were close but belonged to different fraternities. On the web between his right thumb and forefinger, Tugade wears a tiny green dot, indelibly a mark of Lex Leonen (The Law of the Lion).
This lion roars: “You want a scoop?” Of course! “There’s one runway opening with no ILS, instrument landing system, for the last one year and six months. Until we bought a new one in October. (On the path of the runway) are a condo and a TV sportscasting station.”
Passengers and residents in the area were living by the skin of their teeth and they didn’t know it. (More next Tuesday.) (Jullie Y. Daza)