This quicksand is not a soil condition

The other day, my young corporate boss, Mr. Johnvic F. Gullas, fetched me in his sleek sports car. We were on our way to a regular visit to one of his business concerns on the western part of our province. Perhaps, to approximate the capability of his automobile, he drove at a clip faster than our usual speed.

In trips like that, business nuances more than anything else would pre-occupy our minds. That day though, Mr. Gullas, took some unexpected lateral steps and skirted issues affecting his bank. He expressed concerns not entirely related although not completely stranger either to our usual business menu. No matter that he spoke in unintended allegory, his irrepressible political bloodlines surfaced.

Sir Johnvic talked about quicksand. This soil condition being not common in our country, he preliminarily went on to describe it to me. What fascinated me more was his understanding of this phenomenon being more substantive than most, I think.

At the onset of our conversation, he tried to describe a man who falls to a quicksand. According to him, an ordinary person who steps into one is immediately seized with unimaginable fear. His survival instincts work faster than his thought process and instantaneously his physical reflexes as his hands trying to claw himself up and out of the muck and his feet attempting to kick his whole corpus up come to play only to realize horribly that each movement manages to do brings him deeper into the endless pit.

Upon my urging, he led, quite hesitatingly though, to where our talk was, in fact, heading. Clarifying that what he would say next was really an expression out of the abundance of caution and not necessarily as the stand of his political family, he let his apprehensions go, eventually. His brief discourse on a quicksand did not dwell on it being a soil condition. It has parallelism to the developing political unrest. My corporate boss was saddened that the situation of the administration of Her Excellency President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo might be likened to a quicksand, refusing to take my suggestion that we would call it, for purposes of discussion as a Rodolfo Lozada Jr. quicksand.

The query of the Ombudsman into the aborted ZTE deal got our attention. I tried to refresh the memory of my boss that as early about six months ago, a complaint was lodged with that office on issues related with the said transaction, and so, it could not be a survival instinct.

Sir Johnvic was not unaware of it. In fact, he draw the first parallel of a man in the quicksand to the president. That the Ombudsman sat on the complaint for half a year and announced its action only last week indicated that this was survival mode. This Ombudsman investigation is a cute but legalese attempt to divert the attention of the people from the Senate inquiry. By making it as public as possible, its eventual and totally expected pronouncement that the First Gentleman and the mob (?) had not done anything illegal shall put the findings of the senate in a shade of doubt.

Also, the Department of Justice launches its own investigation. My corporate boss and I can see in it some parallels to the kicks of a person in a quicksand. This investigation purports to find any corrupt hand on the illegal ZTE deal, but the probers are not at all restrained from looking into the culpability of Mr. Lozada for whatever he might have done in the past. Thus, when instead of filing the appropriate information in court against those who attempted to plunder public funds, the DOJ hails to court Mr. Lozada, it shall have actually portrayed that we should not listen, to much less, believe in this whistleblower.

These twin moves of the administration are the same perilous acts of a man in the quicksand. Quite unfortunately, because the intentions are not appreciably honest they will only boomerang to the president and like quicksand situation, will only aggravate her situation.

* * *

Email: [email protected]