Hemmed in by deadlines, we captioned that Cebu Daily News/ Inquirer column as “Perennial Irony”, then hit the transmit key…“Viewpoint” ( 24 May 2013 ) focussed on “Naty”, a 53-year old beggar, who looked a haggard 80.
Naty never read, about senators and aides who’ve snitched from the pork barrel in the name of paupers like her. What matters is even left-over food, she shrugs. Alms cadged from passersby tide Naty and grandkids to the next day. Walang tutong sa taong nagugutom. “There’s no burnt rice to the hungry.”
Now and then, the wife slipped, to her sardines, rice plus a few bucks for medicine, since tuberculosis ravaged her frame. Naty huddled in a squatters colony. That’s a universe away from Jinggoy Estrada’s P120 million plus mansion, in Wackwack subdivision.
From Los Angeles, Jinggoy this week, dismissed the Ombudsman’s charge that he ripped off P231.8 million in pork allocations. ‘”That’s an April Fool’s Day joke.” Nobody laughed.
Within squatter hovels, tuberculosis spreads like fire in a dry cogon field. Despite health program gains, TB incidence here remains the highest in Southeast Asia. It kills 75 Filipinos daily. In this squalor, little gifts can bring a shaft of joy. Last Christmas, Naty preened in a new red polka dot dress that the wife gifted her.
Thieves stole, last week, the few things Naty while she scrounged for food “Everything,” she wailed. “Even that red dress that you gave”. The only resort she could think of was flight. But she didn’t have anything to buy a ferry ticket to Negros.
Tickets were no problem for Senator Ramon Revilla Jr – charged by the Ombudsman with filching P514.9 million from pork barrel, for bogus NGOs. He left, with his family, aboard Emirates Airlines flight EK335, on March 29. He’ll spend Holy Week, in Jerusalem, “to seek divine intercession” on what his office gingerly calls “present predicament.”
Revilla’s departure triggered a flurry of questions on the Net. Haven’t we learned from Senator Juan Ponce Enrile’s former chief of staff. Atty. Jessia Lucilla Reyes? “Gigi” didn’t fly back from Hongkong but vanished instead. So did auditor Yolanda Ricaforte, who oversaw jueteng contributions, when the Estrada impeachment trial lurched forward. Reyes is now among Senate chiefs-of-staff hauled before the Ombudsman.
In July, Revilla Jr. met Sen. Panfilo “Lacson, over a Japanese dinner. He asked how the one-time fugitive evaded arrest over the still-unsolved murders of publicist Bubby Dacer and his driver, Emmanuel Corbito.
“Revilla was straightforward in his questions to Lacson” Inquirer reported Thursday. When is the best time to leave? How does one dodge arrest warrants? The reply was: “When the resolution of the case is ready for submission, preliminary hearing had been completed and during that time there is really nothing to do but wait.” And when is that? Yesterday.
Nonsense, Revilla’s spokesperson snapped. The senator will return by April 19. Or was it Easter Sunday? In any case, Naty has already left.
“When someone steals another’s clothes, we call them a thief”, Basil the Great wrote. “Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked ( but ) does not?” Will Imelda Marcos, who abandoned 1,220 pairs of shoes when fleeing Malacañang, agree that “shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes”?
By happenstance, the Supreme Court this week “ affirmed with finality its 2012 ruling forfeiting the almost $40-million Arelma assets of former president Ferdinand Marcos.
In 1972, Marcos secretly stashed $2 million with Merrrill Lynch Securities in New York under the Arelma S.A., a Panamanian corporation. The fund has increased to P1.8 billion at current exchange rates – which Ferdinand Jr and Imelda claimed as their own.
The “totality of assets and properties acquired by the Marcos spouses were manifestly and grossly” way beyond their declared incomes, the anti-graft court said. Bongbong and Imelda failed “to overturn the prima facie presumptions of ill-gotten wealth.”
Yearly, the country loses about P200 billion a year to corruption, Transparency International Index asserts. That’s almost two percent of economic output. That could have eased the ravages of hunger. “Among developing Southeast Asian countries, the Philippines has the 2nd biggest undernourished population, next to Indonesia,” states the Food and Agriculture Organization’s ‘World Food Insecurity Report’.
Beyond price tags, is the theft of hope from ordinary people, like Naty. That is the real cost of this scam. And that brings to fore the blurred issue of restitution –- or the return of what was swiped from others. Beyond a jail term, how much will those ultimately found guilty be compelled to pay back?
Recall the taxpayer Zacchaeus’ arithmetic. ‘Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor,” he said. And if I cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house.”
The mathematics of sleaze is reflected in “splitting of the loot,” Sen. Teofisto Guingona said. Half went to the lawmaker and 5 percent to the chief of staff. Ten percent was grabbed by conspirators in receiving agencies. Janet Napoles, now in detention, kept 35 percent. “And zero percent goes to the claimed beneficiaries”.
In a 1955 award winning movie, the kid Marcelino offers a small loaf to the Crucified and says: “Tiene cara de hambre.” “You have the face of hunger.” Just like Naty.
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