Long on rhetoric, short on action
‘ 44 face disqualification for overspending.’
That made me sit up. Could Comelec - the much-maligned Commission on Elections – actually be putting its foot down? Flexing its official muscles and sending cheating politicos to jail? Well no; don’t be silly. Comelec has taken four years to come up with a list of electioneering candidates who allegedly overspent their quota during the 2010 campaign and just in time for their subpoenas and investigations and enquiries to be swamped amongst the hurly-burly of the next elections which are just around the corner.
Every election time – local or national – we see candidates electioneering early, incumbent officials utilising barangay resources, misplaced posters and tarpaulins, utility poles festooned with streamers, posters nailed to live trees, oversized placards, obvious overspending, those brass bands and cavalcades don’t come free... and yet has any candidate ever been disqualified (Apart from the ‘nuisance’ unknowns)? Has any winning candidate ever been tossed in jail for cooking the spending books? Isn’t it a bit late in the day, four years on, for Comelec to decide it’s going to investigate runners in the LAST elections?
Here’s a solution. At registration time, be it local or national elections, if any candidate for any position has any outstanding litigation or complaint against him or her then they are instantly disqualified from running. Any complaint – from fiddling the pork barrel fund to utang at their local tindahan. If any candidate has the slightest whiff of graft or dishonesty about him or her why should they be entrusted to serve the people? Strike them off the list -make for a shorter one, wouldn’t it.
Comelec, is of course, only one of our government agencies which don’t work, long on rhetoric but short on action. Take the Bureau of Customs. Just the other day on the evening news we see a couple of vanloads of previously customs-confiscated rice turning up at some businessman’s residence. I’ve often wondered what happens to all those confiscated cargoes – garlic, auto spares, spuds, onions, rice – and now I know. It’s gradually siphoned off out of the gates and sold to the enrichment of all. I wonder how many fingers were in this latest pie?
Or DENR, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, the agency tasked with protecting our environment which hasn’t yet realised trees are part of that environment. Forget Dacudao – amble up to the Buhangin Crossing where, nearby, there’s a developer bulldozing several hectares of mature and mixed fruit trees – probably all gone by the time you read this – making way for yet another shopping mall, a mall the city needs like a boil on the butt. DENR? DoD more like, Department of Destruction. Or how about the DTI – the Department of Trade and Industry – which busily ‘urges’ us to report traders selling over the SRP – suggested retail price. There was an item on the national news showing a DTI rep, clipboard in hand, asking a manic Manila market vendor why she was selling chicken at P50 over the odds. Just asking, mind you, certainly no chance of closing her down for unscrupulous trading. In fact the guy was almost on his bended knees to reassure the lady – only questions missus, ‘monitoring’, the DTI apparently powerless to rap a few knuckles, rather like the National Telecommunications Commission which freely admits it can’t do a thing about the nation’s internet service – in the hands of a few – which is the most expensive and inefficient in SE Asia.
Lastly lastly, why is it there are so many retired military men heading up these national agencies – I noticed another one the other day down at the customs. Is it A, because there are no professionals qualified for the post or B, keeping the military sweet?