For delicadeza’s sake

“Public office is a public trust. Public officers and employees must, at all times, be accountable to the people, serve them with utmost responsibility, integrity, loyalty, and efficiency; act with patriotism and justice, and lead modest lives.”

This is how the 1987 Constitution, in particular Article 9 Section 1, started off the provisions on the accountability of public officers to the people. Sounds simple, but recent developments have proven that they are not.

When public officers begin to forget that “sovereignty resides in the people and all government authority emanates from them,” then that’s when the problem starts.

When South Korean Prime Minister Chung Hong-won offered his resignation in April, following a public uproar over his government’s response to the April 16 ferry disaster that left more than 300 people dead or missing, many of us hoped that our public officers could have the same delicadeza.

South Korean President Park Geun-Hye accepted his resignation, but later on had to retain him because of failed attempts to find a replacement. Her first nominee, a retired Supreme Court justice, was forced to withdraw because of criticism over the large income he earned in private practice after leaving the bench. The second, a former journalist, withdrew over comments he made suggesting Japan’s repressive colonial rule on the Korean peninsula was “God’s will.”

Then, of course, there’s President José Mujica of Uruguay who lives simply and rejects the perks of the presidency. He lives in a one-bedroom house on his wife’s farm and drives a 1987 Volkswagen. He donates most of his salary to charity so he makes the same as the average citizen in Uruguay.

When called “the poorest president in the world,” Mujica says he is not poor. “A poor person is not someone who has little, but one who needs infinitely more, and more and more. I don’t live in poverty, I live in simplicity. There’s very little that I need to live.”

When President Noynoy Aquino rejected the nomination of Nora Aunor because she was convicted for drug possession in the United States (something that turns out to be false because she was actually cleared of the charges), and then refuses to accept the resignation of Budget Secretary Butch Abad because to do so would be tantamount to admitting that the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) was wrong (despite the Supreme Court ruling that DAP was unconstitutional), when no less that our President does not have the slightest idea what public trust means and entails, when senators and their staff and other co-conspirators who have been accused of stealing or misusing public funds get “special treatment,” then clearly there is a breakdown in morality in government.

What about the rest of the alleged wrongdoers?

Observers have been asking what has happened as far as the others who have been implicated in the PDAF scam.

Pork barrel queen Janet Napoles, for instance, has identified former legislator Arnulfo Fuentebella as among those involved in the PDAF scam. In fact, the Commission on Audit (COA) has, in its 2007-2009 special audit report, identified P40.27 million-worth of irregular PDAF and Various Infrastructure and Local Projects (VILP) allocations to a questionable NGO beneficiary when Fuentebella was deputy speaker during the Arroyo administration.

Pundits argue that the Ombudsman should zero-in on the officers of the 82 private organizations that the COA had questioned in its 2007-2009 special audit report for receiving PDAF and VILF funds endorsed by incumbent and former legislators, including the Partido District Development Cooperative Inc. or PDDCI which was the beneficiary of P18.6 million of Fuentebella’s PDAF outlays that were coursed through the Technology Resource Center (TRC).

Meanwhile, Fuentebella is once again in the hot seat after Camarines Sur Gov. Migz Villafuerte revealed that parties identified with the former speaker are behind illegal mining operations in the Caramoan Peninsula, which led to last March’s death of four small-scale miners in Lahuy Island.

In a surprise turn of events, Napolcom approved last June 9 an en banc resolution suspending or withdrawing the powers of Villafuerte as Napolcom deputy in the province as an offshoot of the Caramoan killings.

Napolcom’s action has surprised CamSur folks, considering that Villafuerte was the one who had officially complained to regional police head Chief Supt. Victor Pelota Deona about the local police’s “inaction” on rampant illegal mining in Barangay Gata and quarrying in Barangay Pili, both in Caramoan, by parties identified with Fuentebella.

In his motion for reconsideration asking the Napolcom to review its June 9 order suspending his Napolcom deputation, Villafuerte noted that due process was not observed.

For one, he noted that the commission summarily upheld the confidential report of the its Bicol office without first conducting an investigation into the crime and the real issue that had caused it, which was the unabated illegal mining and quarrying in Caramoan.

That there is mining at all in Caramoan should be a prime concern of the police leadership because it has been happening with impunity in a tourist zone that President Aquino no less has declared off limits to mining.

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