|
Faced
with never-ending fuel-price increases beyond his
control, Angelo Reyes, AFP chief of staff prior to being
appointed secretary of defense, then interior, then
environment, and then energy, solved the problem by
ordering oil-and-gas dealers not to talk about price
increases.
He told
oil companies, “No announcements should be made on
underrecoveries. It will not do anybody any good if the
industry players will make announcements based on their
own projections, which could be wrong.”
He told
LPG dealers, “You cannot make announcements based on
future projections. You are announcing and announcing.
Do you know what you’re doing? You’re increasing and
increasing your price ahead of everybody, and then when
price increases don’t materialize, you drop your price
to look good.’’
Another
retired general, Dionisio Santiago, is in charge of the
government’s war against illegal drugs. His record as
chief of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (Pdea)
is nothing short of remarkable: five of seven
international drug syndicates neutralized, nine major
drug labs outside Metro Manila busted and, in Eastern
Visayas alone, 200 drug cases that led to convictions.
How did
he do it? He planted drugs on suspects, if reports are
to be believed.
He said,
“We sometimes do this although this is against the rule
of law. Definitely we only apply this matter to some
cases, like a subject who is publicly known to be
peddling drugs but always escapes arrest. This is when
we enter the picture.
“But
Pdea operatives make sure that they [known drug
traffickers] won’t know that we put planted evidence. We
are doing this because we want to neutralize big
personalities engaged in the illegal-drug trade which
destroys the future of the youth.
“This is
a remedy that we sometimes undertake so that we can put
to rest some people. Kesa naman patayin natin e di
plant-ingan na lang natin para mabilanggo. Alam n’yo
to kill a cat there are so many ways, pero hindi
namin gagawing very obvious ang planting.
[Rather than killing them let’s just plant evidence so
they go to jail. You know to kill a cat there are so
many ways, but we won’t make very obvious the
planting.]”
Those
two retired generals remind me of Narciso Abaya, another
former AFP chief of staff and now president of the Bases
Conversion and Development Authority, who solved the
problem of rigged bids for supply contracts with the AFP.
How?
He
learned the cartel meets “in dimly lit restaurants”
where they rig bids and then they send “pretty ladies in
miniskirt” to collect payment from GHQ (AFP General
Headquarters), so he banned pretty ladies in miniskirts
from GHQ.
Recently, yet another retired AFP chief of staff,
Hermogenes Esperon, was appointed presidential adviser
on the peace process. He is supposed to find a peaceful
solution to the communist insurgency and the war in
Mindanao as soon as he returns from a “well-deserved
vacation,” to use Gloria Arroyo’s words. I can’t wait
for this general to demonstrate his problem-solving
skills.
Buencamino is a fellow of Action for Economic Reforms (www.aer.ph). |
