he Senate must stop its
investigation be-cause Merceditas Gutierrez, the "see-no-corruption,
hear-no-corruption" Ombudsman, suddenly woke up one day to find that the
nation’s attention has been riveted for months on the scandalous overpricing of
the proposed national broadband project?
The senators, excepting Miriam Defensor Santiago (who made
the suggestion), Juan Ponce Enrile and Joker Arroyo, should be exchanging high
fives for the unsolicited compliment. They had been patiently chipping at the
whole edifice of lies erected around the corruption-laden deal. Now that the
investigation is heading straight to the doors of the liars and the thieves,
they are being asked to back off, to borrow a word that whistleblower Joey de
Venecia used to describe how Jose Miguel Arroyo sought to persuade him to give
way to former Election chair Benjamin Abalos who was already the designated,
ahem, facilitator with the Chinese supplier firm ZTE Corp.
May we suggest that Sen. Alan Cayetano, chair of the lead
committee Blue Ribbon, strike a deal with Gutierrez? The Senate and the
Ombudsman have been proceeding on different paths in the campaign on corruption.
They should formalize the division of labor, as it were, and make it official,
to wit:
Gutierrez shall stick to running after clerks. The Office of
the Ombudsman has been boasting of record number of cases investigated and of
record number of convictions at the Sandiganbayan. She should stick to what she
knows best.
The Senate shall focus on big-time corruption. Like the P720
million fertilizer scam pulled off by Agriculture undersecretary Jocelyn "Joc
Joc" Bolante and the P1.2 billion rip off in the computerization program
undertaken by the Commission on Elections during the time of – surprise! -
Abalos with a Korean firm (why is it that foreign corporations are such an easy
touch for "commissions"?)
This way, Gutierrez would not be placed in a tight spot like
hauling before the Sandiganbayan her sponsors to the post she holds now.
In our proposed cooperative endeavor between the Senate and
Ombudsman, we had sought to carve out a place for the Department of Justice
under Raul Gonzalez. Try as we might, we could not accommodate another agency
whose expertise is in running after the whistleblower-accusers instead of those
accused of grand larceny. Likewise, we could not find a place for the police
whose expertise runs to preventing witnesses from testifying.
Gloria Arroyo may call this a dysfunctional system. But how could we expect
the system to function as designed when she herself is on the dock and widely
seen as behind the ongoing cover-up?
