The great Juan Ponce Enrile, a.k.a the alleged architect of martial law in the time of Marcos the Elder, used to nonchalantly mouth a quick yardstick: if it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, it must be a duck.
Can Marcos the Younger use the same principle to ferret out the truth in ongoing new revelation about who’s who in the recent floodgate that threatens the government anew about the insufferable, unconscionable corruption in high places of trust?
Per Marcos initial, not necessarily premature, analysis the virtual deluge that hit most part of the country, science didn’t not only validate and vindicate the public call for safety against climate change. It exposed what tragically happened when contractors’ defy it, for one reason or another, mostly for one reason.
In the time of another prodigal presidential scion, the catch-all was moderate your greed. It was also deemed a catch 22 scenario in view of the conflicting truth or lies, as the case maybe. It was difficult, if not impossible, to turn down P200 million dollars plus a burger.
Apparently, it’s tough or as theologians say, it is hard to learn a lesson.
Except for the helplessly obtuse or habitually cynical, the expose by no less than the President that 15 contractors lord it over as to who get what, where and when anti flooding projects for the whole shebang, is still shocking. It’s an old news rewritten or rehashed, as it were, as new news.
The unnerving revelation was timely or untimely, depending on which political side you’re on, for several reasons. The President .bragged about the new Filipino in his recent state-of-the nation (SONA) address. The current administration announced it needs to borrow some 2.7 trillion more for its 2026 operation. Every now and then the vice president has been telling the whole world that the highest leader of the land can’t even perform his JD (job description) to a T.
The President or his spokeperson means business. Violators will be known,published and thereafter probably punished. It will be sooner than later. Some projects have already been prepaid even before the habagat set in.Unfortunately, the president or his alter ego has said thanks but no thanks to the offer made by a local executive to unearth – no pun intended—the damned dam maker or its equivalent politician or engineer.
This is a pivotal moment for the President, and the nation. It can, once and for all, end corruption which is automatically and logically linked to poverty in the Philippines. It’s a tough call for the son of a former dictator who once proclaimed also a new society of Filipinos. It will be like testing how the water is wet with corruption and who’s soaking up all the wetness.
In the latest intimacy of unethically questionable conduct, a suggested paradigm of how public trust should be measured, no less than the Senate President is placed under a scrutinous social radar for scruples or the lack of it. He advertised himself that he has been a benefactor by way of donation—the latest a whopping P30 million bonanza to his 2020 political campaign. It’s a ho hum of a news, he brushed it off. And he’s a top notch lawyer to boot
Legal and election experts view it from a different filter: the Senate President has been weighed on a moral scale and is found wanting.
How deeper and further is the President willing to go into the water to get at the bottom of it? The President is, at best, nuanced. Your guess is as good as mine. The Senate President is a hard-core ally, an inveterate loyalist that goes back to history. Fifty percent efficiency is said to be equal to 100 percent loyalty. Some doubted the Senate President’s loyalty to Constitution, his political loyalty is out of the question. Period and interjection marks added.
Forget the idea of a possible mass firing squad against erring contra tors as a neophyte (uninitiated) wishes it.The death penalty is out of the book as per our Constitution. Besides, it’s counterintuitive , even counter-cultural to the President’s vision of a new Filipino. Schadenfreude is not part our corporate animus. The jury is still out on the crime against humanity raps in the International Criminal Court. We still are a community , notwithstanding the solicitude or soliloquy at the Hague.
But there’s bad news from Jun Lozada, a collateral damage in the Chinese NBN ZTe deal way back then, who was later on jailed for exposing a questionable plan. It was a deal with unintended consequences, most whom Lozada bore along with his family but happy in the end to live and tell the whole story.
The Philippines, he said, will be better off if two things happen:a war or a benevolent dictator rises which could upset the proverbial apple cart. There will be a rearrangement of the social, economic and political order. If any of these take place, stories about the greedy contractors may not happen anymore. It’s an idealist vision and far from the murky issues faced by legislators, politicians, misused funds and presidential campaigns in 2028.
He hasn’t heard one vignette , perhaps apocryphal, though : one day, the son of a prominent political family, let’s say even presidential, went to the office of a friend in government. The son asked the friend if he had seen how huge the municipal hall was. The friend dutifully nodded. The hall, the son boasted, will not be able to contain their money with unshakable glee.
Is the president aware of the joke?
