Prosecute them all
The prosecution of guilty parties in the P10-billion pork barrel scam – hopefully one that will lead to the conviction of Janet Lim-Napoles, three senators and others involved – should serve as a warning to the entire bureaucracy of the Philippine government that misdeeds cannot be hidden forever.
Senate Minority Leader Juan Ponce Enrile, Sen. Jinggoy Estrada and Sen. Ramon Revilla Jr may just be the first batch of legislators haled to court for plunder.
The Department of Justice under Secretary Leila de Lima assured that this is just the first wave of cases being filed.
Senate President Franklin Drilon must let the law work and do nothing to stop, if not facilitate, the suspension of his colleagues.
This is all Drilon can do apart from agreeing with Sen. Francis Escudero who said that the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee’s separate probe of the imbroglio should continue.
Our lawmakers should not tempt fate. There are already not-so-distant rumblings of a clamor for the entire Congress to resign.
In the first wave of the pork barrel scam cases, networks of the Office of the Ombudsman, Department of Justice and the Commission on Audit across the nation have the mission to prosecute other officials involved mess.
The spotlight must now turn to barangay captains everywhere who may have illegally dipped their fingers in the pork barrel.
If they did, they should be prosecuted and jailed.
Unless the whole chain of collaborators of pork abuse are held to account, the smallest players would end up new wholesale operators like Napoles.
Eugenio Faelnar, former barangay captain of Guadalupe, Cebu City is now under pressure to expalin how he used P14.7 million in Priority Development Assistance Funds (PDAF) of former congressman Antonio Cuenco of the city’s south district between 2006 to 2008.
The goat house he arranged to be built in the mountain barangay of Taptap is an empty, unused shed. No goats were ever bought.
And where is the bumper harvest of lanzones, mango, durian and rambutan from trees planted and grown in Cebu’s hills which seedlings were supposedly purchased using P6.2 million.
What did the Department of Agriculture do with the P7.6 million that Faelnar said he returned because he no longer wanted to buy hybrid goats?
The Ombudsman’s Office, which looked into the case years ago, all of a sudden is active again.
Whether it’s a momentum provided by the Napoles scandal or not, revisiting the “goat house” is a good reminder that local officials with secret misdeeds will get their comeuppance in the coming October’s barangay polls.
