Nail the pork, have reforms

From cyberspace to Luneta and every plaza of major cities of the country, Janet Lim-Napoles has been demonized down to fiery hell last August 26.

Then, three days later, Malacañang Palace unfurled the red carpet for the supposed mastermind in the P10 billion pork barrel scam. Not content with the red carpet welcome, President Aquino served as “Ma’am Janet’s” – in the words of DILG Secretary Mar Roxas – advance party to Camp Crame.

The actions of the president and his men on Aug. 29 up to the transfer of Napoles to the VIP jail in Fort Sto. Domingo in Sta. Rosa, Laguna speaks for itself

Napoles was earlier quoted by one of the whistleblowers as saying “We control government” or something to that effect.

As elaborate details of pork barrel corruption get publicized, it is now clear that Napoles and her ilk just represent one side of the corruption coin.

No matter how one flips the coin, the other side is the people’s elected representatives in government.

While the public’s ire is on Napoles and on how the Aquino administration is coddling her is understandable, the bigger picture is the culture of corruption that has been institutionalized.

Indubitably, the other side of Janet Napoles is your friendly lawmaker (current and former), officials of government agencies tasked to help the poor like the Department of Agriculture, Department of Agrarian Reform and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, and their subsidiaries.

Viewed in an even larger frame, corruption has rooted firmly because the people have been desensitized to the evils this thievery bring.

As things turned out, the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s detailed exposé of how taxpayers’ money has been stolen from government coffers, awakened the social concerns of the usually indifferent and passive citizenry. Thus the million-people-march.

Often congressional investigations, reform agenda and even litigation hardly made a dent on the leakage in the national treasury.

We go back to the Edsa revolt that toppled the Marcos dictatorship in 1986, the second Edsa movement that toppled and eventually convicted President Joseph Estrada for plunder, the arrest and detention of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the resignation of Ombudsman Merciditas Gutierrez and the impeachment of Chief Justice Renato Corona, and yet it is still business as usual for most of our corrupt political leaders.

Even if the Aquino administration committed serious missteps in the handling of the Napoles case, it should not discourage the Filipino people’s hopes to finally have the government it truly deserves.

Compared to other anti-corruption campaigns, the anti-pork barrel movement may be the first in our history that a defective system in government is the central figure of the campaign rather than a single personality.

That should be the silver-lining in this current reform movement. How this anti-pork barrel movement turns out may even lead to our political maturity.

We are all aware that passion fueled by anger brings people to a protest march and this may well be the easy task, but the real work of reforming and overhauling the system is more challenging and it demands passion of a different kind–deeply-rooted love of country, love of neighbor, and love of God.