Peace of the damned

The administration keeps pointing to the economy as the biggest casualty in the renewed political turbulence triggered by a corruption scandal bigger than the one that brought down Joseph Estrada.

The argument would gain more traction if those robust economic growth figures had trickled down to the grassroots in the past seven years.

Instead people see only the rich becoming richer and the poor staying below the poverty line. Or else, as businessmen like to joke, income disparity is narrowing because the rich are getting poorer from being squeezed by the administration.

The country’s economic managers themselves have admitted that the government needs to work on the trickle-down effect.

Apart from the slow trickle of benefits from economic growth, the administration’s lament can gain more sympathy if it can explain why sweeping a $329-million corruption scandal — plus a botched kidnapping — under the rug of its preferred investigating agencies would mean long-term economic progress.

One of the reasons for our sad cycle of boom and bust, of why we seem to keep shooting ourselves in the foot, is that we leave too many anomalies unresolved, letting them languish in a dysfunctional criminal justice system until they recede sufficiently from national memory to be tossed out, with the guilty going scot-free.

We allow too many crooks to go unpunished. The only ones who are dismissed or sent to prison can be considered penny-ante thieves when you compare the amounts they have stolen to those in the major corruption scandals since the Marcos regime.

We know what’s rotten in the system, but because many of the people who are in a position to correct the defects benefit from the flawed system, little has been done to right the wrongs.

If the nation never gets the complete picture in the national broadband network (NBN) scandal and full accountability becomes impossible, there will always be someone in the next administrations who will think he or she can get away with plunder.

There will always be the risk that corruption will compromise large-scale projects, many of which are truly needed by the country.

Contracts will be approved and massive foreign investments plunked in, only to be voided by the next administration or the courts because the deals have been tainted with plunder.

The country will always be an arena for thieves battling thieves, unless someone steps in and reduces opportunities for thievery.

Until the flaws in the system are corrected, the potential for political instability will always be there, threatening to taint the rosiest economic growth figures.

That is what this effort to ferret out the truth in the NBN deal is all about — an effort that the administration is trying mightily to sabotage.

Political instability is a short-term threat to economic gains. Letting the NBN scandal go unresolved, like many of the others in the past, poses a long-term threat to sustained economic stability.

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Though Filipinos have grown wary of people power in the mode of the revolts in 1986 and 2001, mainly because of concern that the nation might get another Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the average Pinoy is not stupid and can see through lying, cheating and stealing. The average Pinoy has not lost the capacity for outrage.

What form that outrage will take is anybody’s guess. If history were to be a gauge, the administration has nothing to fear in protest rallies or prayer gatherings that are planned in advance. It can always field its own crowd and stage its own rally – which is what administration forces are planning for Monday.

What the administration should worry about are spontaneous expressions of public outrage.

Spontaneity marked the two people power revolts. Something triggered sufficient outrage to make people decide that they’ve had enough. They gathered at EDSA without a plan, an announced schedule or a rally permit.

In the camps these days, the buzz is that a recent informal loyalty check showed about 70% of military officers would resist attempts to be used by the administration for partisan purposes or suppressing dissent. And the officers would protect the people in case an administration in panic mode tries to use the police for such purposes.

The administration saw what happened when it tried to prevent Rodolfo Lozada Jr. from facing the Senate. What gave Lozada’s testimony the ring of truth was the effort to silence him.

Yesterday a lawyer who claimed to be representing retired Master Sergeant Rodolfo Valeroso returned Lozada’s passport, validating another detail in the witness’ story.

To this day the government has not yet explained why a retired soldier, hired only last December in a unit under the Philippine National Police, which has more than 100,000 regular members, would be tasked to secure a VIP arriving at the NAIA. And don’t argue that Lozada was no VIP. Someone who is given P500,000 in cold cash by the deputy executive secretary has to be one very important person. 

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The outrage over Lozada’s disappearance somewhere in Calamba would have been immensely greater than what people felt when he finally talked. 

The administration should take note of that as the public awaits what Romulo Neri might have to say on the NBN deal.

By now it should be dawning on Neri that this administration rewards loyalty by kicking the dog – especially if the dog has been calling the master evil. One day he is going to be fed to the wolves, like his patron, ousted speaker Jose de Venecia Jr.

If Neri truly has nothing left to say, what’s the fuss about allowing him to face the Senate?

Yesterday he called for a year of “social peace.” It’s not the effort to unearth the truth that is threatening economic gains. It’s the attempt to bring the peace of the silenced to a restive nation.

That’s the peace of the damned.