• Rep. Edcel C. Lagman
• 19 January 2012
• 0916-6406737 / 0918-9120137

            Although Rep. Danilo Suarez has not garnered an incontestable absolute majority of minority members to replace me, I am resigning as Minority Leader to give way to former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s anointed one.

            I likewise resign as Chairman and member of Lakas-CMD and as Vice President of the Centrist Democrats International (CDI), a worldwide organization of Christian and Muslim Democratic parties, of which Lakas-CMD is a member.

            I will be an independent and will fiscalize the Aquino administration and continue to advocate progressive and alternative agenda.

           My relation with some minority members who are closely allied with and beholden to Arroyo has become grossly untenable.

           My resignation would also put a stop to the creeping signature campaign of the GMA-backed Suarez camp which has inordinately demeaned opposition members who had been relentlessly pressured to abandon their support for me despite their having signed in December 2011 a resolution entitled “To Maintain Rep. Edcel C. Lagman as Minority Leader” bearing the signatures of an absolute majority of the minority members.

           I cannot continue serving a political aggrupation which deliberately refuses to recognize competent, militant and responsible leadership and would opt to follow blindly the importuning of former President Arroyo.

           The insistence of Suarez on a term-sharing agreement for the minority leadership is contrived to deodorize my ouster which was finalized in Arroyo’s hospital suite at Veterans Memorial Medical Center in early January this year.

           I shall explain fully my resignation on Tuesday, 24 January 2012, before the plenary.