The planners of the lampposts are worse plunderers!

The issue of the allegedly overpriced lampposts continues to hog the headlines. After all, it is, if substantiated, corruption of the worst order. There are few signs indicating that we are about to throw it to the dustbin of our forgetfulness. Rather than the story slowly tapering down and in the process ebbing our emotional outcry, we have become a people angrier with each passing week. Our collective indignation is focused on the reported horrendous manipulations of the prices of these decorative lighting gadgets. We have this sickening feeling of being betrayed by the very persons on whom we have reposed our trust.

We are supposed to be a race with a short memory. Is it our virtue (not vice?) to forget easily the wrongs committed against us. But, on the issue of the lampposts, there are incessant developments of the increasingly unpleasant kind. For instance, we have seen the scalp of two mayors and few high-ranking government officials claimed. Even if their suspension is just, as the lawyers would call it, preventive, the escalation of the ugliness of the case is fueled by it.

Its most recent twist involved the cutting off of the electrical connection occasioned by their apparently unpaid high maintenance costs. As I understood the news story, the power company was set to stop servicing these posts. Eventually, the gadgets would become dark symbols of government''s costly misadventure.

So, the issue of overpricing is compounded by the huge cost of keeping these lampposts lighted. Because it appears that we may not have prepared ourselves for the kind of expense needed to light these implements nightly, we are now seriously confronted with the question if they were worth installing, in the first place.

I had the occasion to write about these lampposts long before the matter of their reported over pricing caught our attention. True to the off-tangent nature of this column, I said in this corner, days before the actual staring of the ASEAN Summit, that these constructions were uselessly extravagant. My thesis viewed the angle of uselessness and extravagance.

Allow me to revisit my article. It was an expression of personal indignation. I felt it was very grievously wrong for our leaders to even think of putting up decorative lampposts. To me the idea was senseless, as it was preposterous. They were decorations, weren''t they? Who would ever think of spending money, (I did not know the amount involved then) on decorations when our country was buried deep in international debt?

To be accurate, however, every one agreed that there was a need to do everything to ensure the success of the summit. National pride, we called it. Arguments like putting our best foot forward reverberated. Within that context, the favorable endorsements for our city''s face-lifting as we readied ourselves for the summit was a given. To cite an example, how else could we ascribe the willingness of taxi drivers to attend seminars geared towards educating them on the ways to take foreign passengers?

Then we started boarding up the blighted portions of our cities. We even painted the roofs of shanties so that from the highest span of the bridge, they could not be seen. And the minority among us, like me, started to ask questions.

We did claim that a part of the kind of façade which was visibly put up by our government was undeniably cosmetic. We pointed our fingers specifically in the direction of the lampposts. We singled them out to be useless.

If the reports were true, those gadgets seem to be implements of national plunder. Really, if that be the case, those who participated in the pillage should suffer the kind of penalty commensurate to their depravity.

But, more than that, if we were to follow our original theory that the project of putting those decorations was a dire waste, let us not just prosecute those who financially benefited from the plunder. Better still let us trace it to its origin. Those who pushed for the decorative lampposts should be held answerable for the wasteful extravagance in the face of mounting and acute public want.