In the eyes of the public, the “senatong” and “tongressmen” in the Napoles-PDAF scandal have been convicted as plunderers, grafters and guilty of malversation. Add to this the plunder of the Malampaya Fund (where 10 times the amount lost in the PDAF scam was stolen) and a senator’s allegation that a fellow senator financed the Moro National Liberation Front’s siege of Zamboanga. As can be gleaned from the tweets and blogs in the social media, and from the antipork rallies and the poll surveys, none of these have endeared the political class to the Filipino masses.
But what comes next? Will the Filipino people see justice done, or will all this just show President Aquino’s “bosses” that on “daang matuwid,” he cannot talk the talk and walk the walk when the going gets rough? The Commission on Audit’s reports on the Priority Development Assistance Fund and Malampaya Fund indicate that the Department of Budget and Management and other agencies violated the law during the presidency of Gloria Arroyo. It doesn’t look like these malpractices stopped in 2010 when Arroyo stepped down from Malacañang.
The accusation that no less than a senator bankrolled the Zamboanga siege tells us the length and breadth politicians are willing to venture into just to save their skin. The accused senator, after all, has been said not only to have helped “lay down the immediate justification” for martial law but also to have been involved in several coups d’etat.
Could it be that some people are indeed plotting a “Red October” or “Black November,” or “White Christmas” to escape the full impact of the recent plunder scandals?
—JOSE OSIAS,
jzosias@gmail.com