ARABIAN NIGHTS
What seemed to be a very small issue of attendance at work has cost President Elipe and his sister perpetual disqualification from holding any office with imprisonment of six to ten years. For someone who has been exposed to local governance, such was surely not the most serious graft case in an LGU.
Any adult who has experienced transacting business in any local government unit would have seen and even perhaps participated in some forms of corruption. Using fixers for instance to save one from the hassle of lining up and waiting for ones turn is already a form of corruption.
As for job orders and rank and file, a simple wasting of office hours doing nothing or using office materials for purposes other than performing ones functions such as a school project of a son or daughter are for me even way bigger crimes than falsifying an attendance sheet to let’s say someone who is really productive at work. Although I am not saying that such were the case of the Elipe siblings. I was helping out an LGU in the western part of Mindanao when they reigned in Oro.
Creating positions just to accommodate political supporters or even hiring them as job orders just because they helped in the last election even if they are actually not needed in any project being done are upfront corruption too.
The bigger corruption however which escapes the Sandigangbayan year in and year out is the deliberate manipulation of the whole budget to get the biggest share of commissions and kick backs from suppliers and service providers. For example, a local chief executive or even a department head would design so much programs that entails trainings and meetings just so all activities can be held in a hotel or restaurant that he or she prefers.A common occurrence even in local health facilities are the excess of medicines and supplies that are hardly used yet they lack those that are greatly needed by health care providers.
For others who have connections with contractors, they would allot bloated budget for infrastructure not really because they have a well crafted development plan but mostly because they have already calculated just how much cut they can get in preparation for the next election, besides it is always plus points when development are actually and literally seen. This is evident in their sporadic construction of roads and buildings that are not even based on needs or in the long term plans of their locality. A simple way to corroborate this assertion is to compare the number of projects implemented in a barangay where the incumbent official won against a barangay where he lost in the election. 9 in 10 would show I am right on this.
I am not saying that Elipe should be spared from being accountable to the crime he committed, but my God, no body seemed to see the very big elephant in the room.That was not, and is surely not the worst corruption case we have in this region.
Was the case politically motivated? Of course it is. Was justice served? Well, justice will only be served if the bigger corruptions are stopped.
What then is our role? We can be watchdogs. If a simple DTR can put someone in prison or at least disqualify him from ever running again, how much more the anomalous transactions of different departments from our different LGUs who surely have paper trails with them.