The no. 1 reply of those whose names appeared in the Napoles list and Luy file was that they did not know Janet Napoles, or have not met with her socially or professionally. To a man, or woman, that was the first thing they said in their vehement protestations and denials.
And the first thing I thought of when I heard, or read, this was: So what? Maybe they did not know Napoles. Maybe they had never met with her socially or professionally. But their people could have. Maybe they did.
Comes now Napoles suggesting precisely that. Her revised list has now grown to 20 senators and 100 congressmen, past and present, and except for a couple of senators and a few congressmen, they all dealt with her through “agents.” Which makes sense: Not all of them would have met with her face to face. They were senators and congressmen while she was just, well, a two-bit hustler.
Having said that, however, I must also sound a word of caution about the list itself, and against blanket condemnation of those who appear in it. However Napoles and Luy have to be taken fairly seriously, they may not be taken at face value. The principle remains that the liar is sibling to the thief, and vice versa.
There’s need to sift strenuously through Napoles’—and Luy’s—records to determine their veracity, or weight. Receiving campaign funds from Napoles is not naturally a crime, she wasn’t known as a crook then. And in any case, you look closely at the campaign contributions of the various candidates then and now, and only the candidates of the Kapatiran will be left standing.
Quite apart from that, the inclusion of some people there is just plain misleading, if not malicious. I just learned that Jun Magsaysay gave P2.5 million each to a couple of perfectly legitimate recipients in the south, which he had been funding for some time, coursing his Priority Development Assistance Fund allocations through the Department of Agriculture. How the money ended up in Napoles’ nongovernment organizations he has absolutely no idea. Ask the people at the DA. But now he appears as one of those who transacted with Napoles, with all its sordid implications.
He has reason to feel insulted, dragging down as it does the Magsaysay name. I myself know him to be one of the most honest persons in the world. If it could happen to him, it could happen to the others.
The “Napolist” needs to be carefully “policed.” That is to say, it may not be dismissed peremptorily, but it needs to be taken critically. Maybe Napoles is telling the truth, having come to terms with her conscience. Or maybe she’s just trying to cloud the issue, by throwing in the good with the bad, the guilty with the innocent. Thereby suggesting that “everyone does it,” thereby suggesting that either everyone is just as guilty or just as innocent. Who benefits from that? The three senators who got pinned down at the start, who have been charged with graft by the Ombudsman, and who stand to be arrested anytime now. Who are Juan Ponce Enrile, Jinggoy Estrada and Bong Revilla.
I am not averse to the Senate expanding its investigation into the scam and looking at the culpability of the people mentioned in Napoles’ expanded list, including former lawmakers who are now staunch government allies. Let the chips fall where they may. The fear that Congress will grind to a halt from all this, shrouded as it will be in suspicion and distrust, is more than offset by the greater fear that some of them could be truly culpable. And the fear that Congress will be nudged into wayward directions, unable as it will be to carry out its mandate of making laws, is more than offset by the greater fear that crooks could be presiding over the making of our laws.
But first things first. First, let’s push the cases of the three senators forward. First, let’s put some closure to the cases of the three senators. Otherwise we’ll just be going in circles. Otherwise we’ll just be jumping through hoops in a circus.
One thing, though, that we can come away with from all this even now: the realization once and for all how bad the idea of the pork barrel, officially known as the PDAF, and its kindred instrument, the DAP (Disbursement Acceleration Program), really was for this country. Both have been scrapped, though you never know about their future reincarnations.
I’d like to end by expressing some appreciation for Kapatiran’s contribution in this respect. Kapatiran, the only real party in this country—which is to say the party is bigger than its individual members—was also the only one that openly and categorically opposed the pork barrel. And did so long before civil society discovered its baneful effects last year and took to the streets to protest it. The party was scoffed at for being unbelievably naive, for not realizing that the pork barrel was the fastest and most efficient way to bring government services to the grassroots.
In fact, it was all the others who were unbelievably naive for imagining that when lawmakers are given the power to use hundreds of millions of pesos every year as they please, they would actually use it to benefit the people. Kapatiran was right: The pork barrel was only the fastest and most efficient way to dispossess the grassroots of its due.
What made the pork barrel a particularly dangerous thing in this country was that it operated under a culture that had no deep-seated appreciation for the inviolability of taxpayer money. Here, like traffic lights, the use of the people’s money for the people themselves is not an imperative, it is just a suggestion. It was Kapatiran as a group that warned shrilly about the problem long before others did. Except that, like John the Baptist, it was ignored as a voice in the wilderness.
Well, some voices in the wilderness tend to be prophetic.