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PNoy death before kidney transplant shocks nation

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FORMER President Benigno S. Aquino III, more fondly known as PNoy or Noynoy, died early Thursday morning (June 24), shortly after being rushed to Capitol Medical Center in Quezon City. His family said his death certificate listed the cause of death as renal or kidney disease secondary to diabetes. They said he “died peacefully in his sleep” and was declared dead at 6:30 a.m.

The country’s 15th President was 61.

Reports of his dire condition started swirling since dawn, but media outlets got the official announcement from the family only nine hours later, with two sisters, Ballsy and Pinky, apologizing to the crowd outside the hospital and attributing the delay to the strict pandemic protocols that required completion of a swab test.

His body was brought subsequently to the Heritage Memorial Park in Taguig City for the wake.

Aquino, who served as congressman of Tarlac’s second district for three terms (1998-2007) and then senator from 2007 to 2010, was catapulted to the presidency in 2010 on the wave of the nation’s outpouring of grief over the death of his mother, former President Corazon Cojuangco Aquino, to cancer, in August 2009.

Senate President Vicente Sotto III said the Senate—where Aquino served for three years—is in mourning. The Philippine flag was placed at half mast outside the Senate building. Hours later, flags at Malacañang Palace were also placed at half mast.

Former Public Works chief under Aquino, Rogelio Singson, told CNN PHL Aquino had been undergoing dialysis thrice a week, and was preparing for angioplasty and a subsequent kidney transplant.

He called Aquino “really a servant leader.”

As they faced the media, Ballsy Aquino-Cruz, the eldest of the Aquino siblings, asked her sister Pinky to read the family’s official statement.

The family statement, written in Filipino, cited the 15th President’s trademark of keeping a low profile always, something that marked his “service to the nation—without fanfare, from the heart,” because he always considered people as “his boss.”

His sisters said it “was painful for us to accept that he just quietly absorbed the criticisms,”  but, always, he told them not to worry, “because I can still sleep at night.”

They recalled how how he faced all investigations launched after his presidency—before the Sandiganbayan and at the Senate in 2017 and the House of Representatives in 2018, always personally bothering to appear and explain himself.

“No words can express how broken our hearts are, and how long it will take us to accept the reality he is gone now,” the family statement said.

Former Sen. Bam Aquino said he was heartbroken by the death of his cousin. “He gave his all for the Filipino, he did not leave anything,” he said.

One of his former Cabinet officials, Rogelio Singson, said Aquino had been undergoing dialysis and was preparing for a kidney transplant.

Condolences poured in from Philippine politicians, the Catholic Church and others, including the US government, current President Duterte’s administration and Ferdinand Marcos’s daughter Imee who is now a senator.

Political legacy

Aquino, who served as president from 2010 to 2016, was the heir to a political legacy of a family that has been regarded as a bulwark against authoritarianism in the Philippines.

His father, former Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr., was assassinated in 1983 while under military custody at the Manila International Airport, which now bears his name. His mother, Corazon Aquino, led the 1986 “people power” revolt that ousted Marcos. The army-backed uprising became a harbinger of popular revolts against authoritarian regimes worldwide.

Although a scion of a wealthy land-owning political clan in the northern Philippines, Aquino, who was fondly called Noynoy or PNoy  by many Filipinos and had an image as an incorruptible politician, battled poverty and frowned over excesses by the country’s elite families and powerful politicians. One of his first orders that lingered throughout his presidency was to ban the use of sirens in vehicles that carried VIPs through Manila’s notorious traffic jams.

Aquino, whose family went into exile in the US during Marcos’s rule, had turbulent ties with China as president. After China effectively seized a disputed shoal in 2012 following a tense standoff between Chinese and Philippine ships in the South China Sea, Aquino authorized the filing of a complaint before an international arbitration tribunal that questioned the validity of China’s sweeping claims in the strategic waterway on historical grounds.

“We do not wish to increase tensions with anyone, but we must let the world know that we are ready to protect what is ours,” Aquino said in his State of the Nation Address to Congress in 2011.

The Philippines largely won. China refused to join in the arbitration and dismissed as a sham the tribunal’s 2016 ruling, which invalidated Beijing’s claims to virtually the entire South China Sea based on a 1982 UN maritime treaty and continues to defy it. Aquino’s legal challenge and the eventual ruling plunged the relations between Beijing and Manila to an all-time low.

Economics grad

Born in 1960 as the third of five children, Aquino never married and had no children. An economics graduate, Aquino engaged in businesses before entering politics.

During the tumultuous presidency of his mother, Aquino was wounded by gunfire during a failed 1987 coup attempt by rebel soldiers trying to lay siege on the heavily guarded Malacañang presidential palace. Aquino was in a car with companions on the way back to the palace in Manila when they came under heavy gunfire. Three of his security escorts were killed and Aquino was severely wounded, with one bullet remaining embedded in his neck all his life because it was too dangerous to take out by surgery.

He won a seat in the House of Representatives in 1998, where he served until 2007, then successfully ran for a Senate seat. Aquino announced his presidential campaign in September 2009 by saying he was answering the call of the people to continue his mother’s legacy. She had died just weeks earlier of colon cancer.

“I accept the responsibility of continuing our fight for the people. I accept the challenge to lead this fight,” he said.

Vow vs corruption

HE won by a large margin on a promise to fight corruption and poverty, but his victory was also seen as a protest vote due to exasperation with the corruption scandals that rocked the presidency of his predecessor, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who was detained for nearly five years and was released after the Supreme Court cleared her of the charges. Arroyo later successfully returned to political power, at one time serving as House speaker under Duterte.

Public expectations of Aquino were high and while he moved against corruption—detaining Arroyo and three powerful senators over corruption allegations—and initiated anti-poverty programs, the problems in his disaster-prone Southeast Asian nation, which remained wracked by decades-old communist and Muslim insurgencies, remained daunting.

Under Aquino, the government expanded a program that provides cash dole-outs to the poorest of the poor in exchange for commitments by parents to ensure their children would attend classes and receive government health care. Big business, meanwhile, benefited from government partnership deals that allowed them to finance major infrastructure projects such as highways and airports for long-term gain.

One of the legacies of the Aquino presidency was the signing of a 2014 peace deal with the largest Muslim separatist rebel group in the country, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

Bunglings

Political opponents have pounded on what they say were his administration’s bungling of a number of crises —the Luneta bus hostage crisis in 2009 that ended with eight Chinese tourists from Hong Kong shot dead by a disgruntled police officer, and delays in recovery efforts in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in 2013.

Aquino drew flak in 2015 for his absence in a solemn ceremony at a Manila airbase, where air force aircraft brought the remains of 44 police commandos who had been killed by Muslim insurgents while staging a covert raid that killed one of Asia’s most-wanted terror suspects. Aquino proceeded with a scheduled inauguration of a car manufacturing plant and his opponents said he lacked empathy.

Aquino retained high approval ratings when his single, six-year term ended in 2016. But the rise of the populist Duterte, whose deadly crackdown on illegal drugs has killed thousands of mostly petty drug suspects, was a reality check on the extent of public dissatisfaction and perceived failures during Aquino’s reformist rule.

Aquino campaigned against Duterte, warning he could be a looming dictator and could set back the democracy and economic momentum achieved in his own term.

After his presidency, Aquino stayed away from politics and the public eye. According to his former Public Works Secretary Singson, Aquino told him in a cell-phone message on June 3 that he was undergoing dialysis and was preparing for angioplasty, a delicate medical procedure to treat a blocked artery ahead of a possible kidney transplant.

Aquino is survived by his four sisters. With a report by AP

Image courtesy of Jimbo Albano

Read full article on BusinessMirror

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