EDITORIAL - Delicadeza

It’s a sign of the times that a public official who resigns irrevocably merits commendation. The resignation of Nonnatus Caesar Rojas as director of the National Bureau of Investigation drew attention especially because the reason he cited seems to have disappeared from public service, although government officials routinely pay lip service to it.

Delicadeza or sense of propriety, Rojas said, was the reason he was ending his short-lived service in the NBI. Rojas, a government prosecutor who assumed the top NBI post on July 20 last year, smarted over the public pronouncement of President Aquino that he did not trust the NBI in the manhunt for businesswoman Janet Lim Napoles. Two NBI officials are suspected of tipping off Napoles about the warrant for her arrest. The President himself received Napoles when she surrendered, and personally escorted her to Camp Crame.

Citing command responsibility, Rojas quit. A clarification from the administration that he was not one of the two suspected NBI officials failed to dissuade him. The public scoffed when it was reported that the resignation was irrevocable. Now that it has turned out to be true, the public can only hope the same sense of propriety or delicadeza will be the rule rather than the exception in public service.

Even in the daang matuwid administration, public officials cling tenaciously to their posts, unmoved by questions raised about their integrity. Career civil servants may be granted some leeway; the law entitles them to due process and degrees of punishment befitting the offense. But presidential appointees, who serve at the pleasure of the appointing power, should know enough when to quit and save the President from embarrassment.

Since assuming power in 2010, the President has had no such luck with his political appointees, especially when those suspected of impropriety are close to him. This was the case with former interior undersecretary Rico Puno at the height of a gun deal controversy, and now with Land Transportation Office chief Virginia Torres, who was shown in a video playing slot machines in a casino – after she claimed she merely sat down to rest and did not play the machine. Reminded that a Malacañang order bans public officials from even entering a casino, the daang matuwid government explained that those banks of slot machines were in an arcade and not a casino. Where is delicadeza when it’s needed? The public can only hope it did not go out with Nonnatus Rojas.