THE irrepressible Sen. Dick Gordon and other senators should look into why corruption and plunder are endlessly happening, not only in the police organization, but also in other government agencies.
In the just concluded probe by the two powerful Senate Committees—Blue Ribbon and Justice—headed by Gordon, what we witnessed in the investigation of Police Gen. Oscar Albayalde is at best a publicity yarn with President Duterte as the principal target.
It’s funny that Albayalde is being blamed for a high-profile drug-related case that happened during the administration of President Benigno Aquino III. This is a case that should have been investigated, prosecuted and decided by the proper court six years ago.
Unless the senators, some of them with presidential ambitions and identified political Duterte enemies, really look deeper into the pervasive problem, they’ll only end up wondering why corruption and plunder are again happening instead of being prevented by putting important people in jail.
Let’s look at the crimes and how they were committed, and why they should have been prevented in the first place by officials from the four independent constitutional commissions established by the 1987 Constitution to safeguard public funds from corruption and plunder, to choose the upright and dedicated people involved in governance, to monitor the three branches of government against corrupt officials, and to control and supervise employees in government against immoral and criminal acts.
These important government agencies are the Commission on Audit (COA), the Commission on Elections (Comelec), the Ombudsman and the Civil Service Commission (CSC), all with sweeping judicial and quasi-judicial powers to prevent the commission of corruption and plunder.
It can be legally and morally argued that some officials from these four constitutional agencies may have committed criminal negligence in the performance of their duties. The basic principle that one does not only commit a crime by commission but also by omission applies to some of them.
Worse, many of them, particularly from the COA, the agency mandated by the Constitution to strictly audit and account public funds getting in and out of the National Treasury, appear to have colluded with those involved in the crime.
The question is who will now investigate these impeachable officials? Under the Constitution, the House initiates and investigates impeachable officers and if evidence is established, the Senate tries and punishes the culprits.
But you have a situation where most members of the Senate and House are themselves under public scrutiny for possible involvement in pork-barrel scams.
Will the Ombudsman do it and finish the job? But isn’t it also under scrutiny for gross negligence?
Under the Constitution, the office of the Ombudsman independently monitors all three branches of the government with powers to prevent, investigate and prosecute grafters and plunderers in government.
The Comelec periodically screens out candidates for more than 17,000 elective positions, including those running for president, vice president, senator and congressman, and make sure that the Omnibus Election Code is directly followed.
Curiously, and this has not been corrected up to this writing, the Code itself appears to be encouraging the commission of corruption and plunder, particularly Section 100, which allows a presidential candidate to spend P10 per voter and another P5 if he or she is running under a legally recognized political party. This means P750 million based on 50 million voting population.
A senatorial candidate is allowed to spend P3 per voter and a congressman a little bit lower.
Can you imagine a law allowing a presidential candidate to spend P750 million for a position that pays a maximum salary in six years of only P3.8 million? It’s even a joke to run for president with this campaign budget.
In recent years, expenses for senatorial posts ran to billions of pesos.
The implication is that when you get elected as senator, the first order of the day is to recoup or recover your expenses and along the way, comes pork barrel of every size, shape and color.
For its part, the CSC, with the new Administrative Code of 1987 (EO 292), is constitutionally mandated to promote morale, efficiency, integrity, responsiveness, progressiveness and courtesy in the civil service.
Arguably, scams happened because of the breakdown of morale and discipline, and this is largely traceable to criminal negligence.
Briefly, the government accumulated budgets for the past 33 years (1989-2019) is estimated at more than P100 trillion, with over P10 trillion of this going to pork barrel scams.
Looking back, it is not just the previous presidents, the budget secretaries, the senators and the congressmen who have allowed the likes of, for example, Janet Lim-Napoles to thrive but the constitutional oversight people, as well and as a consequence, finger-pointing and buck-passing became the order of the day, further endangering the State.
So what else is new?
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.