Gov’t under September siege

Gov’t under September siege | Daily Tribune

If only the Constitution included both the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Senate President as impeachable officials, it could have afforded them the opportunity to redeem themselves rather than face the ignominy of forced resignation or sudden ouster.

Still, beyond this constitutional space, the specter of the people’s wrath reminiscent of Nepal, Indonesia and the other anti-government protests that erupted worldwide is real. They share three motivators in common, namely: 1) corruption; 2) economy; 3) politics.

As it stands, the government is in for a long haul. The political vortex has long begun — a chaos of unseen proportions that led to a well-entrenched “money heist” — orchestrated at all levels of the officialdom. The hard evidence against the criminals as much as the crime show telltale signs of highly syndicated corruption hemorrhagic to the economy.

It might qualify as the worst economic sabotage in human history that would remain unresolved for a while, and even see the culprits go scot-free.

It’s a perfect distortion of Adam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand,” except that this one rather than spurs economic growth blurs the lines of public accountability.

The writing on the wall cannot be ignored. The Senate probe has caused the resignation of the public works secretary followed a week after by the ouster of the Senate President, albeit to be replaced by an ominously unpopular choice.

Then, five days after that, the Speaker of the House of Representatives resigned but was replaced by a proxy from the 11 deputy speakers appointed by the outgoing speaker whose seats are deemed coterminous and should have been declared vacant for a level playing field.

The Independent Commission for Infrastructure is viewed as just another “escape route” or to buy time for the so-called proponents to extricate themselves from this grand fiscal imbroglio. If flight indicates guilt, this explains why a central figure in this floodgate corruption orgy left for overseas. It’s not unlikely that a few more implicated congressmen may have also left in the absence of “hold departure orders” from the immigration bureau.

Given that the ICI is simply a bureaucratic experiment created to confront a societal issue by executive fiat, it may soon prove to be an empty shell. From a purist moral perspective, the naked fact that two of ICI’s distinguished members have faced past charges of graft, irrespective of their having been cleared, the sacred “requisites of proven competence, integrity, probity and independence” could be counter-intuitive.

Unless fully vetted by a highly-paid pool of forensic experts rather than media hounds, empirical and scientific findings cannot come full circle. A cover-up at the threshold of this political vortex will prove to be a dangerous gambit no leader in his right mind would dare attempt to navigate or negotiate. The luminous “fall of an empire” is about to take place, given that the woke populace has begun to stage protests en masse. If the good President lacks the agency to undo this grand financial hijacking, his grip on power might slip.

This vortex of political infighting, grand-scale corruption, chronic moral rigmarole by wicked social engineers and corrupt public officials forebodes evil. Let the fight or battleground be within the legal boundaries of the democratic space as the absolute embodiment of public interest. The desired moral, economic, political order is one where the common ground gravitates around a public good — sterilized from fraud, scam, scandal.

When government coffers are being robbed, breaching the trillion mark, the President, so it appears, chose to look the other way. He cannot feign inaction, inability, much less inertia. The only way out of the noose is to show “zero pork barrel” in the 2026 national budget.

He must fail not under pain of the taxpayers’ backlash, Gen Z-led, or “whole-of-society” activism such as mass demonstrations flooding the streets. Better yet, if he can, the good President should resign as a supreme act of statesmanship.