Diokno’s ‘demonizing’ sparked unrest among retired generals

AFP retired generals can’t lead coups d’état. They’re no longer part of the command chain; troops won’t follow them. Besides, after three decades in battlefields, they’d rather play with grandkids.

There’s unrest among retired officers, however. Countless online chat groups, mostly of Philippine Military Academy grads, show it. They share these with similarly aged newsmen (like me) who had covered their budding military careers.

“Healthy, passionate exchanges and debates, even criticism against policies of the present admin, within bounds of our democratic space,” noted National Security Adviser Ed Año (PMA 1983).

Finance Secretary Ben Diokno stirred up retirees’ grumblings in March. Questioning the rising AFP pension budget, he claimed that the country was falling into a “fiscal cliff.” “Unsustainable,” he said, “if this goes on there will be fiscal collapse.”

Slashing monthly pension rates was the Finance Department’s simplistic proposal to Congress. AFP retirees, some of them amputees or still nursing battle wounds, naturally protested.

It didn’t help that Diokno’s Budget counterpart Amenah Pangandaman cited differing figures. Pensions for 2023 total P230 billion, she said, then included retirement gratuity and leave credits for P273 billion gross. Misleading, because gratuities and leaves are part of benefits upon retirement, not later pensions.

Diokno’s DOF website states yet a third 2023 AFP pension: P214 billion. How can there be three figures for the same expense item?

Retired Adm. Ariston delos Reyes (PMA 1971), a mathematician, confronted the duo: “[Their] deliberate and persistent use of vague, undefined, flowery and high-sounding terms aim at disinformation. This confuses the public, which unwittingly accepts their interpretation. “They demonize not only our pension but also our fight for what is rightfully due us.” The National Defense Act (Commonwealth Act No. 1) and 1987 Constitution guarantee such benefits.

Soldiers routinely are separated from families and assigned to faraway places. They risk life and limb fighting state enemies or rescuing disaster stricken folk. By retirement age their physical, emotional and psychological states are usually more deteriorated than civilians’, wrote retired Gen. Edgard Arevalo (PMA 1990).

Respecting Math as an exact Science, delos Reyes uses a fourth 2023 AFP pension figure: P128.7 billion. Senator Panfilo Lacson, his PMA classmate, assured him that that’s what Congress approved during budget debates. It excludes pensions of other uniformed services: police; coast, prison and jail guards; and mappers.

Some AFP retirees scoffed at the Maharlika Investment Fund. Diokno schemed MIF’s P500-billion capitalization at about the same time he called AFP pensions “the elephant in the room.”

MIF exposed Diokno’s ineptness with numbers. As concurrent Land Bank chairman, he plunked P50 billion into MIF. Instantly, the state bank came into breach of operational solvency rules of the Bangko Sentral, which he also once headed. Diokno’s blunder forced President Bongbong Marcos Jr. to suspend and review MIF.

Other issues agitated AFP retirees:

• Shabby treatment of retired Col. Leonardo Odoño. For four months Comelec had ignored the PMA 1964 grad’s quiet requests for telecom companies’ transmission logs of Election 2022 precinct results to the Transparency Server.

When the 82-year-old war veteran went public in March, more than a hundred colonels and generals petitioned Comelec to honor Odoño’s right to information on public matters.

• Same ill-treatment of retired Gen. Eliseo Rio. It turned out that Rio, former AFP electronic communications chief, had been asking for the same logs as far back as July 2022. Despite being former information-communications secretary and head of Election 2019’s Comelec Advisory Committee, the poll body snubbed him.

In March 2023, Comelec gave Odoño and Rio not telco transmission logs but Transparency Server reception logs. Members of UP Vanguard, consisting of advanced ROTC and high-ranking reservists, denounced the deception.

• Confidential-Intelligence Funds. VP Sara Duterte is seeking P500-million CIF for 2024, plus P150 million as Education secretary. She already got the same P650 million for this 2023, although her offices have no law enforcement or security functions. It turned out that Malacañang had given her P125-million CIF in 2022, even if unentitled to such.

AFP retirees want CIFs to be transferred to uniformed services that defend Philippine seas against Chinese aggression: the Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, PNP Maritime Command and National Mapping and Resource Information Authority.

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