[Newspoint] A supreme heartening lesson

Needless to say, there’s every reason to take heart from the announcement from the House of Representatives, with the Senate promising to go along, that it is, after all, denying Sara Duterte the half a billion pesos she has asked for in confidential funds for her office as vice president and another P150 million for the Department of Education, which she concurrently heads. 

It should give an even better feeling that the money is going instead to our security agencies in order to bolster their capability against the Chinese military and militia bullies who have been intruding in our strategic and resource-rich West Philippine Sea with every express intent of appropriating it. 

Indeed, it should restore to us, just as we approach the end of our rope, the democratic sense that all political power is vested in and derived from “we the people.” Such is the refresher lesson that this Sara Duterte episode is forcing us to relearn – people power. There should be no mistaking that it is our collective sustained explosion of outrage that has put her in her place – and should put her and her likes in their place every time they attempt to cross the line.

The line as it applies to the Confidential Intelligence Fund makes for just one case, but the most significant one at this time. The fund’s name alone betrays its own anomaly, and, lest we forget the supreme lesson of the moment in our momentary euphoria, it deserves to be reviewed.

The fund is unmistakably intended for collecting information for security, an aspect of national life so delicate it is better left, we are told, in the hands of the better-knowing government. That’s the reason we’re not told how exactly the fund will be spent before it is given or how it was spent after an audit; and, again, because we are told nothing, we have no way of knowing whether the fund was at all audited. 

The joke is that it’s us who cough up all that money, to pay our taxes year after year so that our government is afforded the means to do its duty to serve and protect us; yet we’re kept in the dark about it. The fund has actually existed for as long as anyone of us might care to remember, and we may have simply gone along with its presumed legality once the budget, of which the fund is a regular item, has passed Congress. After all, the budget itself becomes law at that point.

But, according to the retired senior associate justice of the Supreme Court Antonio Carpio, needed still is a law that defines the limits on the use of the fund and determines whether anything at all about it may be kept secret from the public as a valid security precaution. Another retired Supreme Court justice, Adolf Azcuna, agrees. He also objects to complete secrecy and is uncompromising about audit, although he might allow, he says, a redacted audit report for public perusal, one in which parts determined – needless to say by a credible process – to be truly dangerous for the public to see are blacked out, as is the case with other comparably open societies. 

The fund might have continued to be tolerated if it had not grown so large as to raise suspicions of its indiscriminate or reckless or outright corrupt handling. Indeed, given the culture of dynastic patronage and cronyism with which the ruling regime is so closely identified, worse suspicions are bound to linger – suspicions that what we have is a government neither of laws nor of men, but of con men, and, to be properly non-discriminatory, of con women, too.

When she came to the budget hearings to ask for her own confidential fund, Sara Duterte had in fact become familiar with what she could do with it – by actual experience. She had had about as much money as she was asking for as Vice President to spend secretly every year during most of the six years she was mayor of Davao City, which has a population of only 1.6 million. An audit that managed somehow to get out has revealed that she had 11,000 ghosts in her employ, a secret I don’t know how she can justify in the context of a confidential fund, much less justify in law. Incidentally, what has happened to that audit is a question perfectly fair to ask anytime and certainly critically relevant to ask now.

At the Department of Education, she also had had some of the same, compliments of President Marcos, who had transferred to her P125 million from his own confidential allocation. After spending it all in 11 days, she wanted no more handouts, but a direct allocation. She tried to have Congress believe that the nation’s young were being put in extreme dangers by drug dealers, dissident recruiters, terrorists, and other criminal elements and that security thus, perforce, became a practical function of the department. In quick response, she in fact already built a 400-plus-strong security force, itself  no cheap enterprise to sustain and run. 

What is fact and no mere tale is that if anyone is working on the minds of the nation’s youth it is the government itself, working through Duterte’s department, working right on the school curriculums. It is cultivating a strictly structured, hierarchical mindset by restoring military training in college. It is undermining press freedom by imposing on students, through a course in “media literacy,” its own self-serving idea of what sort of fare they should expect from the press. It is distorting and falsifying history, for now in order to sanitize the records of torture, murder, and plunder during the President’s father’s authoritarian regime, itself the acknowledged model of the previous presidency – the presidency of Sara Duterte’s own father.

Indeed, by her own grave deficiency in education alone, Secretary Sara Duterte distinguishes herself as the most impertinent insinuation in the Department of Education, and the most undeserving of any secret funds, too, to say the least. – Rappler.com