Secrets

Speaking through its legal counsel, Sergio Apostol, Malacañang now invokes the bank secrecy law, and says that debtors are likewise protected from invasion of their privacy. Governance by secrecy.

Secret too is what his Boss Woman told then NEDA director-general Romy Neri when he confessed that Ben Abalos offered him 200 million pesos to play along with the NBN-ZTE project. And the secret is protected by "executive privilege" which nine justices of the Supreme Court recently upheld as valid. And unless some of the nine justices have a change of heart or a sense of history rediscovered, secrecy shall become legal norm from this day onward.

Secrets like Hello Garci. Secrets like the new "baboy" scam, if it gets to the Senate. All these and previous transgressions of both good governance and public trust shall forever be entombed by legal fiat. And with its past buried by Supreme Court imprimatur and hopefully, by public indifference, it shall be signal for everyone in this "good" government to make more hay while God and the people of this benighted land still would not derive sunshine from this corrupt enterprise called the Arroyo government.

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Which is why reader Ramon Mayuga writes his angst from Germany thus:

"The fresh discovery of another alleged anomaly that has been committed under the watch of the Gloria Arroyo administration involving humongous amounts of government funds shows that there may have been a lot more scandals hidden in the cellars of the stinking palace beside the stinking river where the ‘mother of all corruption’ stubbornly sits despite widespread distrust and disgust of her continued presence there.

"It turns our stomach to learn that such a mind boggling amount of money, P2.2 billion (about three times as big as the P728 million allegedly squandered by Jocelyn Bolante in the infamous fertilizer fund scandal) intended to ease pork shortage by lending financial assistance to hog farmers under this government’s swine-raising program may have landed in someone else’s bank account or used for election purposes.

"In German they call it ‘schweinerei,’ (swineri with the last syllable pronounced with a long i) )which means messy or disgraceful business, scandal or obscenity. It is derived from the word ‘schwein’ (pronounced just like the English swine) and also means pig which is commonly understood as dirty. In Pilipino it exactly means ‘kababuyan.’ (Ouch!)

"And if it is proved to be true, that is exactly what this anomaly is - a gargantuan ‘kababuyan.’

"We don’t know what else might be discovered and how much money might have been lost in this seemingly endless series of corruption scandals that have been plaguing this decidedly most corrupt government under the most unpopular president this country has ever had.

"We also don’t know how further the Filipinos’ tolerance can be stretched by the evil deeds of those persons whose craving for more money and power are as unlimited as their bottomless greed.

"We also wonder how long those idealistic young officers in both the military and the police are going to render service to their commander-in-chief who continues to use them as her praetorian guards while the wealth of this nation is being plundered and the constitutional rights of its people being trampled and democracy being raped."

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Mayuga’s despair over a system where corruption so gross is abetted even by the icons of our judicial system reverberates across the country. I am myself surprised to observe, listening to civil society sectors and even political leaders from as far as Mindanao, that the time has come for "revolutionary change."

"The system is hopelessly corrupted," observed a mayor whose constituents have rightly kept voting into public office from the time he entered politics. "The bureaucracy, the judiciary, almost every institution has to be cleansed and purged, not only the executive," said the mayor, who is incidentally, a lawyer.

A businessman who has made enough money to last his grandchildren’s indulgences is so sick of the corruption and the "arrogance of those in power" that he is willing to accept even a "lobotomy" of the present system for two years. Sipping coffee with him and listening to his cri de coeur, I almost forgot that his family used to be in politics too, and his in-laws belong to a famous political clan. But his forebears have kept family honor intact to this day. "I have always argued against any drastic action to reform the system", he told me, "but I have given up, and even my friends, La Sallites, Atenistas, even Ivy League graduates now agree that the usual solutions, like elections, cannot give this country any hope."

A retired soldier who entered politics and served with distinction echoes the businessman’s conclusion. Over lunch of a juicy steak at Rockwell some time ago, astonishing because the man was an octogenarian, he exclaimed, "Sana naman bago ako mawala sa mundong ito, makakita ako ng tunay na pagbabago. Maski dugo ko, iaalay ko."

I will not write further comment to the statements of these eminent persons. Their personal lives and public record bear testament to the sincerity of their spoken word.