Santiago: They can kiss their 2016 plans goodbye

By: Norman Bordadora - 11 years ago

“Their ambitions will go down to zero.”

Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago on Friday wrote off the political aspirations in 2016 of lawmakers that have been implicated in the multibillion-peso pork barrel scam.

“They have zero prospects at this time because you see this is a different thing. It is not exactly trial by publicity alone. We have eyewitnesses,” Santiago told reporters when asked what would become of the political plans of the politicians implicated in the scandal.

“There’s a certain newspaper that was somehow able to get a scoop and able to get copies of these affidavits by so-called eyewitnesses. The whistle-blowers are not just acting out of speculation. They were actual witnesses,” the senator said.

Among those who have been charged with plunder in the Ombudsman in connection with the alleged pork barrel racket are “presidentiables” or near-presidentiables Senators Ramon Revilla Jr. and Jinggoy Estrada.

Revilla and Estrada garnered the most number of votes in the 2010 senatorial elections and were being eyed by their respective parties for higher national office in 2016.

“The PDAF (Priority Development Assistance Fund) and the DAP (Disbursement Acceleration Program) pork barrel scams will not go away. The Philippines has been undergoing complex and conflict-ridden processes and steady erosion of state functions for decades,” Santiago said in a speech before grade school and high school students and their teachers in Makati City on Friday.

“This is payback time,” the senator said.

A failed state

Santiago said the scandals could lead to the Philippines becoming “a failed state” despite the modest economic gains it made over the last few years.

“As a lawyer, I am worried that the present state of pork barrel scandals involving the PDAF and the DAP might turn our country into what political scientists call a failed state,” Santiago said in a speech at Colegio De Sta. Rosa on the occasion of World Teachers’ Day.

Santiago, who has been on medical leave from the Senate due to chronic fatigue, earlier this week criticized the Aquino administration for what she said was an unconstitutional realignment of unused funds and placing them in the service of senators and representatives’ pork barrel.

The former regional trial court judge has also been vocal against the misuse of the PDAF that found their way to ghost nongovernment organizations that deliver similarly non-existent livelihood projects.

“State failure can be caused by rampant corruption, predatory elites who have long manipulated power, and an absence of the rule of law,” Santiago said.

Cannot borrow money

After the Department of Justice’s investigation into the P10-billion pork barrel scam resulted in top leaders of the opposition getting charged with plunder before the Ombudsman, it was the Aquino administration’s turn this week to be pilloried in the media for the possibly illegal and unconstitutional DAP.

“If we’re a failed state, nobody will lend us any more money. Nobody will enter into trade with us because they cannot realize whether we can deliver what we promised in consumer goods,” Santiago told reporters after her speech.

“Eventually the failed state will lead to the collapse of the state and then we might have unfriendly forces to democracy taking over because people might be so disenchanted in the democratic process that they might convince themselves that it might never work at all,” she added.

Santiago has said the unconstitutional realignment of funds to the DAP makes President Aquino “impeachable” for culpable violation of the Constitution.

Lawmakers turned kleptocrats

She added that the lawmakers who received the allocations could be liable for plunder and even bribery if it could be proven that the realignments had anything to do with the conviction of impeached Chief Justice Renato Corona in May 2012.

“As a senator, I am so depressed at the self-seeking behavior of my colleagues that I can hardly escape cynicism about the future of Philippine politics,” Santiago said.

“The senators and congressmen involved have crossed the line into kleptocracy or into state capture,” Santiago added.

Santiago adverted to the advocacy group Transparency International in identifying Burma (Myanmar) and Haiti as examples of failed states due to a high level of corruption and repression.

“Another failed state is Guinea. It experienced some of the highest economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa but, nonetheless, it failed because of the enormous gap between the rich and the poor,” Santiago said.

Santiago has called on Congress to altogether cut the P25-billion congressional pork barrel from the P2.226-trillion national budget for 2014 as one of the steps to avoid massive corruption from causing a failure of the state.

She also called on lawmakers to integrate into the regular budget Mr. Aquino’s off-budget sources of revenues—the P130-billion Malampaya Fund; P12.5-billion motor vehicle users’ charge; the Pagcor Special Fund and the PCSO Charity Fund.