ICYMI, nearly 300 flights were canceled on New Year’s Day and some 60,000 passengers were stranded at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) after its control tower lost all communication. Yet instead of a message from President Ferdinand Marcos Jr addressing the fiasco, the public instead received a vlog featuring him and Vice President Sara Duterte, which dropped at 6:30pm that same day.
Wearing gray hoodies that read Maligayang Pasko (Merry Christmas), the duo discussed their New Year’s Resolution (get more hours of sleep), with Duterte playing palm reader to Marcos, jokingly predicting that the president would get a granddaughter this year.
Yet the timing of the video did not sit well with netizens, who criticized the country’s top leaders for releasing a vlog amid a massive transportation crisis.
“Thousands of inconvenienced passengers in the NAIA fiasco and yet no word from the country’s leaders? Do we still even have leaders or are they just vloggers?” one wrote.
“NAIA has become such an embarrassment to the world because of the NAIA issue and you’re here releasing a vlog? Go work, lazy,” one user said.
In a press conference also held the same day, Transportation Secretary Jaime Bautista said that issues with the airport’s power supply led to the fiasco. Meanwhile, power distribution company Meralco said they found no issues from their end amid the outage.
