Monday, October 05, 2015

68. Leni Robredo

I was hoping Leni Robredo would run for President, but the political gods had willed that she would be slated for the Vice Presidency for the 2016 elections for the meantime. So, it shall be. Leni, wife of Jesse, the Magsaysay Awardee for public service, will be my candidate for Vice President. But I'm not voting for her,  because she is his wife, but because precisely she's demonstrated she's not just his wife. Two items in her resume stand out -- lawyer, Public Attorney's Office (PAO) and lawyer, SALIGAN. These are jobs that I would have wanted to take, but due to exigencies in my own life, I decided to take on the path of a corporate lawyer. Corporate law has been fun, and I've learned and I'm still learning a lot from my work, but whenever I'm around PAO lawyers or former SALIGAN lawyers, I'm always in awe of the kind of work they do and the things they've done. Somehow telling people I've done mergers or have set up and sold utilities, pale in comparison with the accomplishment of the PAO lawyer who had an indigent acquitted of a false accusation of theft or the SALIGAN lawyer who fought a land conversion. I've told myself anything a lawyer does with integrity has its own crazy social relevance, but whatever the PAO or SALIGAN lawyer does has a direct bearing to society and the social relevance is never crazy. She, like the many lawyers who worked for the PAO and SALIGAN, deserves recognition for all the work she has managed to do, for all the financial sacrifices she's made, and for all the dignity that she has brought to the legal profession. One from the ranks of the PAO and SALIGAN should be Vice President or President one day. That can only be Hon. Leni Robredo. 

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