GOTCHA, Published in The Philippine Star, Friday, January 18, 2008
Malacañang fired last year 22 corrupt bureaucrats and reproved four incompetents. It wasn’t much. The Presidential Anti-Graft Commission had sought the sanctions as it watched over 5,000 or so Palace appointees — but wasn’t always upheld. Gloria Arroyo had vetoed the PAGC on a few others it wanted punished. Graft catching even dipped when it came to proverbial big fish, as in cabineteers. The PAGC advice to charge Augusto Syjuco for misusing P9 million in technical education funds was left hanging in a “committee of peers”. Other ministers eluded investigation through deft legal maneuvers.
And so graft remains in polls as top grievance against government. All the nation’s ills are traced to it. Businessmen constantly denounce fraud as investment turnoff. NGOs correlate worsening hunger with thievery at national and local agencies. Analysts fear the malady could agitate a coup d’etat. Even the National Security Adviser warns that the Comelec is now the worst threat to stability because of unbridled corruption in elections.
To be sure, fighting sleaze is not Malacañang’s job alone. Executive agencies like the Finance, Public Works and Budget departments must test their personnel’s lifestyles. Public employees too are duty-bound to report malfeasance of elected superiors. The independent Ombudsman must then criminally prosecute erring officials. And speedy trial and sentencing is the duty of the Sandiganbayan anti-graft court.
Cracks abound in that process, though, and suspects manage to slip through. Ofelia Mendoza Oliva, for instance, was recommended to the Ombudsman for suspension in March 2007 as acting city treasurer of
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Congress’ food-versus-fuel debate expectedly has degenerated into heckling. Feisty Sen. Miriam Santiago started it. Quoting a Nobel laureate’s view that planting oilseeds for fuel will crowd out food crops, she blamed political breast-beaters for a mad rush into biofuels. Feeling alluded to since he had authored the Biofuels Act, Sen. Juan Miguel Zubiri snapped back, accusing critics of promoting oil cartels. Minority Rep. Roilo Golez joined the fray, twitting Zubiri’s attack on renowned scientists and citing former agriculture secretary William Dar’s supposed warnings against growing jatropha large-scale.
Whether a politico campaigns for or against biofuels is not evil; the platform even encourages intelligent discussion and voting. Mechanically to accuse a Dutch scientist of being on the pay of Royal Dutch Shell, just because he and the oil firm happen to be wary of biofuels, is as crass. And misquoting an agriculturist’s opinion definitely misleads. The lawmakers would do well to get back to serious debate. That is, they must call in the experts and, after hearing studied testimonies, determine whom to believe and decide policy.
To begin with, Dar does not oppose the jatropha project of the state-owned PNOC Alternative Fuels Corp. Now the director-general of India-based International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, Dar in fact backs biodiesel extraction from the inedible nut. “We are promoting massive planting of field-tested jatropha and pongamia (oilseed) varieties to rehabilitate wastelands and dry-land villages,” Dar said yesterday in a press statement. “When cultivated in this context, jatropha and pongamia do not gobble up areas for food production.”
Dar researched as well the use of sweet sorghum for bioethanol as gasoline alternative. His NGO has linked up eight Indian villages with a biodiesel refinery where they can sell their harvest. Science-based approach to biofuels is what the country needs, he said.
And that’s what chairman Dr. Rene Velasco has been saying too since the AFC’s founding in 2006. Since jatropha can grow on marginal lands that are un-irrigated or on steep hillsides, he promotes it in such areas to augment farmer incomes. The AFC has set up two seed farms consisting of hundreds of hectares in Nueva Ecija in
