Commitment and lame excuses

Admirers of President Duterte are holding up the dismissal of Interior Secretary Ismael Sueno as proof of his commitment to eradicate corruption, even if by doing so he must “hurt” people who were once part of his inner circle.

Sueno was dismissed after three undersecretaries accused him of profiteering from his office, though the President said he decided to let Sueno go, in the midst of a Cabinet meeting, when the latter admitted he hadn’t read the opinion of his legal department regarding the purchase of fire trucks from a foreign supplier.

Earlier, Mr. Duterte likewise fired then National Irrigation Administration chief Peter Laviña when suppliers complained about demands for kickbacks from projects.

Of course, both Sueno and Laviña denied the charges. But such a ballsy move on the President’s part cannot but elicit the admiration of observers. After all, Sueno and Laviña played important roles during the 2016 election campaign, with Laviña briefly serving as Mr. Duterte’s spokesperson, while Sueno used his experience as a local government official to organize a grassroots movement in support of Mr. Duterte’s candidacy. (Ironically, the three undersecretaries who accused Sueno of corruption were part of the same grassroots effort.)

Most recently, Mr. Duterte also announced the dismissal of a fairly senior official (identified as Chiara Halmen Valdez, who holds the rank of undersecretary in the Office of Cabinet Secretary Leoncio Evasco) on charges related to rice importation.

Clearly, the President is using this rash of dismissals both to burnish his reputation as a no-nonsense anticorruption crusader, and to send a not-so-veiled message to colleagues in the government that he would not hesitate to let them go once suspicion falls on them.

Or as he put it: “I will continue to fire people, the first whiff, maamoy ko lang, maski na hindi totoo(if I so much as smell it, even if it isn’t true), you’re out. Hindi naman kasi mag-generate ng loose talks iyan eh (If nothing happened, it would not generate loose talk).”

We would be applauding the President’s recent moves if the anticorruption campaign was being applied more evenly and consistently. While the firing of a Cabinet official and fairly senior members of the bureaucracy is impressive, Mr. Duterte seems less willing to act as decisively against other officials.

Most glaring is the President’s “advice” to 19 police officers implicated in the killing of Mayor Rolando Espinosa of Albuera, Leyte, to just plead guilty because he would grant them absolute pardon and even promote them. The issue here isn’t corruption but something literally more deadly—the abuse of police authority and brazen impunity to kill someone already under police custody.

This, said a group of former senior government officials in a statement, was “perversion” of the presidential power to pardon, and “morally wrong.”

Then there is the case involving Cesar Montano who was, like Sueno, the subject of a “white paper” prepared by employees of the Tourism Promotion Board accusing him of corruption, nepotism and abuse of power. Malacañang said it would convene an antigraft body to look into the charges, while Montano has gone on a media offensive to explain his side. Asked about the case after Sueno’s firing, presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella said Mr. Duterte was not “favoring” Montano but only giving priority to the charges against the former interior secretary because of his rank.

Hmm, sounds rather lame to me.

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