House Senior Deputy Speaker and Pampanga 2nd district Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (5th from left) (Michael Macapagal's Facebook)

House Senior Deputy Speaker and former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo went to the Philippine Merchant Marine Academy (PMMA) in San Narciso, Zambales on Friday, April 21 to help unveil the statue of a towering figure in her life.

Unveiled in the simple event was a life-sized statue of the Pampanga congresswoman's father, the late former president Diosdado Macapagal.

Diosdado Macapagal statue at Philippine Merchant Marine Academy (Screenshot from Facebook live)

Arroyo was accompanied by her sister, former Pampanga Vice-Governor Cielo Macapagal-Salgado.

The PMMA built the monument to honor the late president Macapagal who in 1963 signed the law converting the Philippine Nautical School to the Philippine Merchant Marine Academy.

This enabled it to confer the degree of Bachelor of Science in Marine Transportation and automatically grant the Third Mate and Fourth Marine Engineer licenses without Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) examination to its graduates.

In her brief remarks, Arroyo recalled that when she was president in 2002, PMMA was already producing 10 percent of the total number of Filipino deck and engine officers manning international ships, thus providing a bountiful harvest of foreign exchange earnings for the country.

Remittances from overseas Filipino workers (OFW), along with the fiscal economic reforms implemented during Arroyo's term, enabled the country to achieve 38 uninterrupted quarters of successive growth and save the country from the major global recession that happened in 2008.