There was a time when these people were put on a pedestal, their lifestyles envied, their wealth coveted, their positions aspired for. Well, not today.
Today is not a great day to be a government contractor, a member of Congress, an engineer for the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) or a member of the Philippine Contractors Accreditation Board (PCAB).
Historically, the DPWH has always been a hotbed of corruption. In high school, more than 45 years ago, there was a kid whose dad worked at the DPWH. We immediately knew how and why they were rich.
Rightly or wrongly, there were some widely-accepted assumptions. We had the same kind of assumptions for government contractors.
Members of Congress don’t exactly enjoy squeaky clean images. Remember the pork barrel scam of 2013? Also known as the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) scam which involved members of Congress and billions of pesos, it erupted into a scandal that ultimately ended in the PDAF being ruled unconstitutional.
But the corruption didn’t end. It simply went through a name change: anomalous budget insertions.
We are a nation of ghosts—ghost projects, ghost employees, ghost beneficiaries. I truly find it incomprehensible how a nation of regular churchgoers can be so callous, conscienceless and criminally-minded.
But let’s think this through. We may not have stolen a single centavo from the nation’s coffers but can we call ourselves blameless? We’ve been cheats for a long time. That’s why we call kickbacks, SOP (standard operating procedure). We made corruption the norm. And that is where we erred.
We know ghost projects exist. We just never knew the extent of it. And if the nepo babies hadn’t displayed their debauchery on loop, we probably would never have known. But now we know and we are outraged.
But outrage aside, we can make it stop. And yet, we don’t. Granting that we don’t recover a single centavo or send anyone to jail, we can make the plunder stop. We can stop voting for these thieves. And we can stop salivating at their lifestyles. And yet, we don’t.
Ghost employees? We know of them, too, though I confess I was shocked to hear it happening at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. I guess we’ve really outdone ourselves now — we truly have become a nation of scammers.
But if the Church who provides the moral compass for the population in this country does not even possess the moral integrity to admit, apologize and rid itself of its own plunderers, what more can we expect from the rest of society?
Students, senior citizens, typhoon victims — the list of ghost beneficiaries in our country just keeps getting longer.
It is impossible for members of Congress, the DPWH or the Commission on Audit (COA) not to have known about the ghost projects. But conflict of interest was rife among them including at the PCAB who has also been accused of monetizing its role.
Everyone is guilty — if not of collusion, of complicity.
Erring contractors should face jail time and a lifetime ban on government contracts. Erring government officials should face dismissal, forfeiture of benefits, permanent disqualification from government service and public office as well as criminal prosecution.
There was a time when these plunderers were put on a pedestal, admired, envied, even worshipped. That time has come to an end.
It’s time to rid the country of ghosts — ghost projects, ghost employees, ghost beneficiaries but also, ghost producers. The only way to restore integrity in this country is to permanently eliminate the names of plunderers from the ballot.