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Sunday, February 08, 2004
Mercado: Yes, the lady is for burning
By Juan L. Mercado
The day after she retired from the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and immunity petered out, Commissioner Luzviminda Tancangco found herself staring down the barrels of twin charges.
At the trigger behind both barrels were: Sen. Aquilino Pimentel and the National Movement for Free Elections (Namfrel). They lodged separate accusations against the lady.
Namfrel slammed Ms. Tancangco for “gross, inexcusable negligence.” She awarded a P6.6-billion contract for 36 million voters’ identity cards when the poll agency had only P1.2 billion.
To back its complaint, Namfrel tacked on the earlier Supreme Court decision scrapping Tancangco’s over-run award to Photokina Marketing Corp.
The contract was “way beyond Comelec’s allocation,” the Court found. The lady’s award was “one that can be slain on sight for being patently void and unenforceable.”
Worse, Tancangco’s folly torpedoed overdue computerization of the May 2004 elections, Namfrel said. The Poll Modernization Law (RA 8346) required Comelec to automate first the 1998 national elections then the 2001 local polls. It failed to do so.
Guess who chaired Comelec’s modernization committee. Who else but Ms. Tancangco.
Instead of heeding the law, she underwrote a failed Voters Identification Registration System – anchored to the lucrative Photokina contract. Todas las puertas abre el dinero, Mexicans often say. “Money opens all doors.”
Following the 1998 and 2001 automation failures, the Supreme Court once again struck down Comelec computer contracts with Mega-Pacific as fraud-marred.
Thus, the, the country finds itself handcuffed to the drawn-out fraud-pocked manual count for this May elections.
“Public officers should be the first judges of the legality, propriety and wisdom of contracts they enter into,” the tribunal snapped. “They must exercise a high degree of caution, so government may not be the victim of ill-advised or improvident action.”
In both the Photokina and Mega Pacific contracts, the Court did not cite erring commissioners by name. “This is not the proceeding to determine where the culpability lies,” the decisions point out.
“But one can certainly connect the dots,” observes the perceptive columnist-tv host Solita “Mareng Winnie” Monsod. “Will Tancangco get away with what she’s doing?”
Senator Pimentel is now doing just that. In asking the Ombudsman to determine if Tancangco and soulmate commissioner Ralph Lantion fractured the Anti-Graft Law, he’s connecting the dots. He’s also debunking the widespread perception that crime in this country pays.
That perception hardened into conviction when pro-Estrada congressmen, led by Rep. Ronaldo Zamora, disappeared from Congress. The technicality of “lack of quorum” led to the scrapping of well-documented impeachment charges against Ms. Tancangco.
Thus, Pimentel asked that the P5 million retirement benefits due Tantangco and Lantion be frozen until the courts rule if Tancangco and soulmate did run afoul of the Anti-Graft Law.
So, where did commissioners like Tancangco, Lantion, Rufino Javier and Mehidol Sadain come from?
Ms. Tancangco came from University of the Philippines. There, her work reaped a bumper harvest of scorn from discriminating peers like Dean Jose Encarnacion and Mahar Mangahas. (How she got into UP remains one of those Onli In Da Pilipins yarns).
She and the others were non-entities-–until the disgraced Joseph Estrada thrust them into a Comelec previously led by towering figures: Hilario Davide, Christian Monsod and Rodrigo Perez.
This group tied up Comelec into knots. They blocked reform efforts by Chairman Alfredo Benipayo. Tactics ranged from boycotting 42 percent of sessions to sitting on the appointment papers of 156 election officers.
They empowered themselves to call en banc sessions and moved to reinstate those fired by Benipayo for corruption. To underscore the polarization, they even anointed Javier as their “spokesman.”
In this permissive climate, Angelina Matibag, charged by NBI for the murder of Comelec education chief Vilma Cinco, sought reappointment.
The Commission on Audit protested against multi-mission peso advances to unbonded officers. In fact, on retirement day, Ms. Tancangco still had to liquidate over P300 million in advances.
These antics led to the Erap appointees being dubbed as the “Gang of Four”—a scalding reference to the plotters who, from 1966, unleashed the “Cultural Revolution” that drove China to near economic-collapse a decade later.
In his book “The Erap Tragedy,” Malacanang chief-of-staff Aprodicio Laquian documents how midnight Palace carousing substituted for governance. We`ll never know if appointments for the “Gang of Four” were signed during one of those alcoholic binges.
Since then, Comelec never functioned as it should. Serious questions arise as to it capability to oversee the crucial May elections. That’d be like “placing vampires in charge of the blood bank,” sociologist Randy David wrote.
China’s “Gang of Four” scorched-earth tactics sought to replace a country’s culture with corrupt and bankrupt ideology. Comelec’s “Gang of Four” feathered their nests heedless of the damage to the critical election process.
“A good man protects three villages,” the Chinese often say. “And a good dog, three houses.” The charges raised by Namfrel and Senator Pimentel are useful first steps in preventing a democratic house from being ravaged.
(e-mail: juan_ mercado@pacific. net.ph)
(February 8, 2004 issue)
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