President Benigno Aquino III and Social Welfare Secretary Corazon “Dinky” Soliman (MNS Photo)
MANILA (Mabuhay) – Social Welfare Secretary Corazon “Dinky” Soliman will face rejection yet again before the bicameral Commission on Appointments, courtesy of no less than Sen. Miriam Defensor Santiago.
In a letter to Rep. Conrado Estrella III, Santiago said she is planning to invoke Section 20 of the CA Rules to suspend consideration of Soliman’s nomination as Department of Social Welfare and Development secretary.
The senator said she has been opposed to Soliman’s nomination from the very beginning of the Aquino administration because the DSWD chief was a “fervent devotee of President Arroyo.”
“All of a sudden, on her way to Emmaus, she heard a voice telling her that President Arroyo is allegedly corrupt. Conveniently, she then turned her back on her erstwhile patron and ran to the other side of the street to join President Aquino’s daang matuwid,” she said in her letter.
Santiago said Soliman should be satisfied with one term as DSWD chief under one president. She also said Soliman cannot retain her post on the strength of her denunciations of her former boss.
Soliman is a member of the so-called Hyatt 10 group of officials who resigned their posts on July 8, 2005 as a result of the “Hello, Garci” wiretapping scandal.
The resigned officials urged then President Arroyo to resign for allegedly rigging the results of the 2004 presidential election.
Soliman was reappointed DSWD Secretary by President Aquino in 2010.
In her letter, Santiago also revealed a more personal reason for rejecting Soliman.
She said Palace insiders “have told me that she and her ilk have felt free to denounce my integrity.”
This is after Santiago voted not to open an envelope of bank documents during the impeachment trial of then President Joseph Estrada.
“I was a judge in the Estrada impeachment case, and I voted against opening the second envelope. Ms. Soliman and her ilk immediately seized this incident as proof that I was pro-Estrada, and therefore corrupt. Eventually, the second envelope was opened, and the glee concert failed to emit a peep when it turned out that they were wrong because there was nothing incriminatory in the second envelope,” Santiago said.
In an earlier CA hearing, Santiago accused Soliman and her ilk of Manichaeism – “an obsolete attitude based on the supposed primeval conflict between light and darkness, where the most vocal proclaim themselves to be the personification of light, and their victim as the personification of darkness.”
“These people are dangerous,” she added. (MNS)