When the blind leads the blind, they fall into a pit. It’s the other way around when the corrupt investigates the corrupt. They deftly steer clear of the scummy pit they ought to be dumped into.
Filipinos know their top officials are robbing them blind with impunity. With the pork barrel or Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), no official landed in jail for stealing it. (Jinggoy Estrada was charged but acquitted of plunder by the Sandiganbayan.) After the Supreme Court declared PDAF unconstitutional, legislators came up with budget insertions that Senate President Vicente Sotto has recently (and ominously?) declared part of the budget process, hence legal.
Will they get punished this time for billions worth of budget insertions that have blown up corrupt in the nation’s face? But how when insertions are legal? And how when the inserters are investigating themselves? Basic human decency (a dose of delicadeza maybe?) demands that they recuse themselves from the case. But lacking the trait that puts humans a notch above four-legged brutes, they did not even make a token offer for the public sector to do the investigating. Why recuse from the case when it is the smartest way for them to get off the hook?
Hence, to nobody’s surprise, the investigation is moving sideways and in circles. Before anybody knows it, the ongoing zarzuela (with award-winning performances by Lacson, Marcoleta and company) will have the inglorious ending of corrupt legislators going scot-free. Notice how senators and congressmen are handled with gloved hands while contractors and DPWH officials are badgered until blue in the face. Expect the latter to become sacrificial lambs (wolves?). But no senator or congressman will ever see the insides of a jail, return stolen money and be disqualified from any future office. That has yet to happen in this country, where those in power can distort the truth any which way they want and steal with impunity.
The Blue Ribbon Committee and the Independent Commission for Infrastructure will most probably take their sweet time badgering witnesses, contractors and DPWH officials and otherwise delay proceedings until people get tired of paying attention. They know from experience that Filipinos eventually lose interest.
Consequently, it is imperative that people firmly push against any and all kinds of whitewash. This time heads must roll. The Filipino people must push for the jailing of criminal high officials. To get this desired result, they most likely must push for it with the same inexorable force of the raging floodwaters that destroyed ghost or substandard flood control structures.
(The planned bigger and more broad-based Trillion Peso March on Nov. 30 should put teeth to this resolve. Care, however, must be taken to make it a purely non-partisan march for truth.)
The masterminds, the legislators who made the insertions, went a (ghost?) bridge too far. The time for stopping them is now or never. We cannot go on leaving our destiny in the hands of leaders who steal us blind and run our country to the ground. Corruption must simply be stopped now or we are doomed. Never again starts now.