The President’s challenge
President Benigno Aquino III’s challenge to detractors to file an impeachment complaint against him may or may not prosper, but that doesn’t exactly smack of political arrogance as militant groups claim it to be.
The President is simply throwing the gauntlet at officials like Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, whose Senate privilege speech aimed at Aquino’s allies and tried, rather unsuccessfully, to portray the ongoing investigation on him, Senators Juan Ponce Enrile, Bongbong Marcos and Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. as nothing more than political persecution with a short-term goal (only three years away) of clinching the 2016 elections.
And the cases keep piling up owing to the tentacle-like grip of the pork barrel gang of businesswoman Janet Lim-Napoles. This time, it’s the Malampaya fund amounting to nearly P1 billion.
The clear beneficiaries, according to the Department of Justice and the National Bureau of Investigation, were (surprise, surprise) former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her husband, former first gentleman Mike Arroyo, former executive secretary Eduardo Ermita among others.
Aside from the usual militant groups, no high profile, influential officials or groups, least of all Senators Estrada, Enrile, Marcos and Revilla, are interested in filing impeachment charges.
Simply put, there is no public support for this initiative. Senator Miriam Santiago, who had become somewhat a lofty legal authority in the midst of the ongoing pork barrel controversy, admitted that public outrage were more aimed at Napoles and the Senate gang rather than the President.
Although that doesn’t excuse the President’s continued use of the Discretionary Acceleration Program (DAP) which Santiago and former senator Joker Arroyo described as “scandalous” and “illegal” since it was only created by the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) and not sanctioned by the Constitution.
Among the reported beneficiaries were former Cebu City-South District congressman Tomas Osmeña, who confidently diverted his P200 million pork barrel sourced from the DAP to the Carcar-Naga City road following Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama’s insistence that the amount be used instead to widen roads rather than build flyovers.
There will be more rallies of course and this would be useful along with public monitoring of the ongoing budget deliberations in Congress in pressuring the lawmakers and President Aquino to scrap the pork barrel, be they the Priority Development Assistance Program (PDAF ) or the DAP.
Rather than engage in creative diversions in allocating public funds, the President and Congress should instead focus on better and tight monitoring and controls on the use of such funds so they won’t be wasted or worse, go directly to the pockets of the unscrupulous, malignant few.
