Give the problem of streetchildren to COA!

First it was the Sinulog Foundation that the Commission on Audit (COA) questioned, targeted and almost caused the cancellation of the country’s and Asia’s biggest festival. But since the Sinulog Festival still went on despite the threat from COA, now it is the Cebu Investment Promotion Center (CIPC) that’s getting the heat from COA. Why is COA doing this now when CIPC has been around for 15 years? We asked the same question on why they questioned the Sinulog, but we didn’t get any reply from COA officials.

One of the reasons why Cebu has truly grown and developed can be directly traced to CIPC whose mission and objective is to promote Cebu as a business destination because no one else would do it for us! COA ought to understand especially in these difficult times, that all the more we need the CIPC to promote Cebu so we could have new foreign investments to create jobs for our people at a time that so many people have lost their jobs!

But that it seems that COA is hell-bent in implementing Circular no. 2007-001 that prohibits the granting of financial aid to non-government organizations or people’s organizations where any of its incorporators, organizers, directors or officers is an agent of or related by consanguinity or affinity to the fourth civil degree to government officials involved in the approval and the release of the financial aid.

I can understand why COA issued this circular because perhaps it has been abused elsewhere. But here in Cebu, the Parian Drop-in Center or the Task Force Streetchildren have done a very commendable job in helping streetchildren find a better future because our government has failed to provide for their needs. These NGOs were created by the Local Government Units to address what the national government has failed to do. Now another National Government agency will take it out once more and deny the poor what is due to them.

I’m glad that Acting Mayor Michael Rama and Cebu City Administrator Francisco “Bimbo” Fernandez will be visiting these COA officials in the hope that they might be granted an exemption. I can only cross my fingers. Perhaps it is time to challenge COA officials whether they have any evidence that government funds released to these NGOs concerned were found to have been spent by the public officials involved? These COA officials know that these NGOs are run professionally and efficiently, which is why for all the years they have spent helping Cebu, they were never involved in any scandal or ugly incidents.

Unless Acting Mayor Mike Rama or Bimbo Fernandez can succeed in touching the hearts of our COA officials, these NGOs are doomed to extinction! I suggest that when once more Cebu City gets too many street children left on our streets, the police should round them up and drop them at the COA offices! Since it was COA that denied these children safe haven, then let’s give the problem to COA!

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The Senate Blue Ribbon Committee chaired by Sen. Richard “Dick” Gordon pointed to Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA) to have “acquiesced” in the acts of former Agriculture Undersecretary Jocelyn “Joc-Joc” Bolante and nine officials of the Department of Agriculture who were implicated in this scandal because she did nothing. But Press Secretary Cerge M. Remonde point out that when the President learned of this, she asked the Office of the Ombudsman to investigate this scam.

But Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez didn’t investigate this scandal, although she says that she did. If she did, it certainly was a snails-paced investigation because we didn’t read any news reports from the Office of the Ombudsman. If indeed the President truly asked the Ombudsman to investigate the fertilizer scam, then what does she think of the way the Ombudsman did their investigation? 

Meanwhile, the ball on the fate of Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez is really in the hands of Congress because she was very adamant in not giving up her post despite all the criticism hurled against her. She’s digging in. We ordinary people cannot do anything anymore, not even the President of the Philippines because as a Constitutional body, only Congress can remove the Ombudsman. So before we accuse Congress for not doing anything to rid this nation of an inutile Ombudsman, then they should start the process of impeachment against Gutierrez who obviously doesn’t even understand what delicadeza is all about.