EDITORIAL - Not worth saving

Calls are now being made for some members of the Cabinet to resign after they were implicated in the P10 billion pork barrel scam. Four members of the Cabinet have been named so far -- secretaries Butch Abad of Budget and Proceso Alcala of Agriculture, Tesda director Joel Villanueva, and ERC chairman Zeny Ducut.

In other countries with more mature societies, such calls are unnecessary. The moment public officials get implicated in controversies, they do not wait for such calls to be made. They promptly resign without being told. In more extreme societies, some officials even commit suicide.

Suicide is out of the question in the Philippines, whose predominantly Catholic beliefs hold the taking of one's life as a sin far worse than that which gives rise to suicide being even considered as an option. But resignation is not too far behind as an impossibility.

Almost nobody resigns in the Philippines. The very rare few who do resign do so only after exhausting every available means to cling on, and only when holding on becomes far more untenable and destructive than the act of resigning itself.

Thus, when the calls were made for the implicated Cabinet officials to resign, nobody was surprised at all. The calls make up the first part of what has become the usual pattern when the country faces some great crisis in governance. The second part is, of course, the falling on deaf ears of these calls.

There is one odd thing, however, about these most recent calls for resignation. The calls were not made because the country has been scandalized enough by the scam. Instead, the calls were made ostensibly to protect the president. What? Protect the president?

This is the president who not only won on the promise of leading a no-nonsense fight against corruption but who keeps bragging about the great achievements he has already made in his anti-corruption drive to anybody who cares to listen.

But what did this president do? Why, he is protecting these Cabinet officials. He has gone public that these officials continue to have his complete trust and confidence. This president does not need saving. In fact he should join these Cabinet officials in resigning.