Quite a number of our supporters and friends have been asking me about the current political situation and how it affects our own plans for 2010. I thank you for your genuine interest in our preparations for the campaign and I owe it to you to provide some clarity and direction amidst the confusion brought about by the quick turn of events. After all this is what leadership is about: Providing clarity and direction amidst the dizzying confusion.

It has been 4 years since July 2005 when the ‘Hello Garci’ controversy led to the Liberal Party call for the resignation of President Arroyo. Since then I had been searching for an alternative political path for our nation.

From 2000 to the present, our nation has been plagued with grave political crisis after political crisis brought about by leadership that failed to provide real solutions to the country’s ills. To my mind, the old, inutile and bankrupt political order had to give way to a new, dynamic, people driven political alternative. The urgent task for those who wished to see genuine change happening was to help work towards providing a viable alternative to ‘trapo’ politics. The people together with reformist leaders needed to work towards providing genuine leadership that was inspiring and principled.

I told myself then that our bankrupt, mindless, trapo politics had brought us to the political mess we found ourselves in. What we needed to chart was a new direction for the nation provided by leadership with vision, with courage and with principles. It was this type of leadership that would inspire our people and lead us towards the ‘promised land’.

It was this burning desire for an alternative to ‘trapo’ politics or ‘politics as usual’ that led us to assert that we needed to do things very differently if we wanted real change to take place. That doing the same thing over and over again in our politics and our elections would yield the same ugly results and would not bring us the desired change. We needed to experiment, to be creative, to think out of the box, to take risks in order to lead and inspire our people to act.

It is my belief that only when leadership is inspiring can it mobilize a critical mass of our people towards an agenda for real change. Only when the people themselves take on the burden of reshaping our nation, only when they are mobilized, can we move the nation to greater heights. If we are to reshape our communities, if we are to reshape our nation, the people in the millions must be mobilized to actively pursue change.

It was this desire for an alternative and the firm belief that we needed to do things differently that led me to run as an independent candidate in 2007. It was this same belief for an alternative that likewise led me to pursue an independent Vice Presidential bid. We needed to be willing to stick our necks out and do things radically different.