Sunday, March 02, 2008 Between Senate appearances, Lozada plans visit to Cebu
CEBUANOS will have a chance to meet and hear firsthand from Rodolfo Lozada Jr. on the ZTE-national broadband deal.
Although the schedule has yet to be finalized, lawyer Neri Colmenares of the National Union of People’s Lawyers (NUPL) said the Senate witness will come and share his story.
Organized last September, NUPL is among those that represented Lozada in the ongoing Senate investigation on the aborted US$329-million telecommunications deal.
“Corruption is an endemic and systemic social problem. Faith and prayer are not enough. We need to act, and this crusade is not of an individual or a particular organization, it should be of all Filipinos,” Colmenares said yesterday.
He spoke before an audience from different civic organizations, militant groups, students, priests and Muslims at a forum in the Seminario Mayor de San Carlos.
Colmenares said the executive privilege that Sec. Romulo Neri invoked in begging off from the Senate hearings is not only unconstitutional and illegal, but also highly immoral.
It hindered transparency, he said, and kept the public from knowing the truth.
Amid rampant corruption in government, 4.1 million Filipinos are unemployed, 6.8 million are underemployed, and 60 to 70 percent live below the poverty line, he added.
Unlike the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), which he found “disappointing,” Colmenares believes the Cebuanos are just as passionate as others in fighting for the truth.
“I do not agree with what Manila said that Cebu is passive on the issue, because during (the late president Ferdinand) Marcos’ time, it was Cebu and the Bicol Region that stood as the first opposition,” he said.
And, Colmenares said, “donations given by Malacañang to churches are obviously to influence the church leaders regardless of what a bishop or priest thinks about it or its intended use.”
“And it is a form of corruption,” he added.
Aside from calling for the scrapping of Executive Order 464 to allow those with knowledge of any corruption in government to testify, the CBCP prescribed no other action in its Feb. 26 pastoral statement.
Though it condemned the continuing culture of corruption in the country, the CBCP said members will act not as politicians but as pastors whose vocation is to order society toward the common good.
“Our message contributes to the flourishing of a democracy which must not be built only on political formulas,” it further stated.
Colmenares said that from 1977, when Marcos was president, to the present with Gloria Macapagal Arroyo as the country’s chief executive, trillions of pesos were lost to corruption.
He cited data from the World Bank that showed that from 1977 to 1997, the country lost P1.958 trillion.
In 2001 alone, corrupt officials allegedly pocketed 13 percent, or P100 billion, of the national treasury.
Organized by the Community Empowerment Resource Network, Inc., NUPL, and People’s Gain, the forum also had as reactors Atty. Democrito Barcenas of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines; Ustadz Najeeb Razul, Voice of Islam Foundation president; Dr. Elmira Judy Aguilar of the Health Alliance for Democracy; Efrain Pelaez Jr. of the Mactan Island Chamber of Commerce Inc.; Fr. Christopher Exala, rector of the San Alberto Carmelite Formation Center; and Emmanuel Mongaya, Sun.Star Superbalita managing editor. (AIV)
