Volunteer visual artists under Bagong Alyansang Makabayan are already preparing an effigy for the President’s State of the Nation Address on Monday. This year’s effigy, likely burned by Monday evening, will show President Benigno Aquino III feasting at a banquet, Bayan said.
“Unlike the traditional fiesta, where hospitality, generosity, and goodwill is encouraged among the whole community, PNoy’s banquet is depicted as a lavishly sumptuous feast for a small circle of guests as the people wait for crumbs falling from the table. The effigy is the group’s take on the kind of economic ‘growth’ that the Aquino government would be claiming during the SONA,” Bayan said on its website.
The Philippine economy grew by a record 7.8 percent in the first quarter of 2013, but Bayan said this has not been felt by the poor.
“The people are not invited to this exclusive dinner party by the ruling elite. Look who’s ‘pigging out’ with Aquino as the nation goes hungry. This government believes that growth will trickle down to the poor but that strategy has proven ineffective. People are being made to wait for crumbs to trickle down even as the richest one percent see their wealth double,” Cris de Leon, spokesperson for artists’ collective UgatLahi, said.
UgatLahi has been helping Bayan make the effigies to protest the SONA, held at the Batasang Pambansa in Quezon City, since 1999. Last year’s effigy protrayed the President as comic book villain Two-Face.
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Photo: UgatLahi
