Antihero

First they wanted her to talk. Now that she has begun revealing all she knows, they want to discredit her.

Janet Lim Napoles may be the vortex of a controversy the political class wishes to blow away; but she is not the vortex of the complex networks of systematic theft that enabled our pork barrel politics.

She is the tip, but not the entire iceberg. Although known, the bulk of this perversion of democracy remains hidden from view. The political class prefers it that way.

The oligarchic democracy restored in 1986 is a fraud. The truth Napoles now threatens to unveil will be subversive. Oligarchic democracy might never recover from the unmasking of its inner workings. Those who love sausages and laws, it is said, must never see how they are made.

This is why it is important for the political class to quash whatever truth Napoles now threatens to reveal. They want that truth devalued, discredited or discounted. The family secrets must be kept in the vault.

This is why, for those who wish a more authentic democracy to dawn, it is important to hear everything Napoles has to say — not for the political pornography of it, but for the edification it brings us about the political system we so complacently call a democracy.

This is why it is important that, in the quick swirl of events, the good bishops have stepped in to embrace Janet Napoles and encourage her to speak her truth, fully and without hesitation. More than others, the bishops know a thing or two about sinners becoming redeemers — even if they do not want to.

Napoles could yet be an accidental hero for the nation. More precisely, the nation’s antihero: a damaged character without much virtue and without intent to greatness, but is carried by the stream of events to accomplish great things for her people.

Not all heroes arrive atop white horses or are announced with trumpets from the heavens. Some of them, often from the least, stumble into playing heroic roles.

They may be reluctant. They may be flawed. They may be unpopular. They are antiheroes.

The great pork barrel scandal began well under the radar. Differences between employer and employee led to a complaint about illegal detention. Some influential persons tried to iron things out and some opportunistic persons thought they could make some easy money from aggravating the matter. They worked at cross-purposes.

When the scandal blew up, the crisis managers (or whoever performed this role for the current dispensation) thought the best way to contain the controversy was to offer the public only a sliver of it, to narrow the scope of the expose, select a few scapegoats and wait for the thing to die down. It was also a chance to politically destroy the administration’s rivals in the process.

The so-called Luy files were submitted to a major daily and then kept in the vault for a whole year. The DOJ had exactly the same digital files and kept them from the public. President Aquino himself, in a bantering moment, admitted he had a list of persons involved in the Napoles operation. That was never revealed, an act that could fall into the offense of obstructing justice.

The chosen scapegoats did not go willingly to the sacrificial pyre, however.  The directors of the crisis management effort had difficulty executing the script.

Then Napoles herself decided to issue a tell-all affidavit. When the Secretary of Justice was given a draft of the so-called “Napo-list,” she hesitated revealing it until compelled by the Senate to do so. Faced with intense public speculation about who was on the list, the Senate had no choice but to publicize the “Napo-list” as well as the Luy files immediately upon receipt.

Every politician named by Napoles have since been busy smearing her name and proclaiming their innocence. If Napoles had no “clients,” she would have no operation. If all the politicians denying they used Napoles to “process” their pork barrel loot are speaking the truth, the woman ought to be released from prison immediately, having been prosecuted for something that did not happen.

The proverbial cat, however, is out of the bag. The genie (or, in this case, the “Jenny”) escaped the lamp.

Since the President, usurping the role of the prosecutors, declared Napoles unfit to be state witness, the crisis managers have lost leverage over her. Now there is earnest talk of more names being named in “supplemental affidavits” emanating from prison. They will come as recollection serves the woman who has now become the people’s witness.

A hardy band of lawyers, seeing there is much worth in what Napoles has to reveal, has taken up the cause of aiding and abetting the truth. All the lame talk of the affidavit being a “worthless piece of paper” that is without “evidentiary value” is in danger of being overcome by the discovery of more proof.

This is not a battle between good and evil. This is a battle to uncover the truth about our politics.

All the petty chatter about “obfuscating the issue” or even destabilizing the present regime will soon give way to the weightier historical question: Do we want to continue to be governed in the old way?

This administration does not have an impressive record of taking a larger view of things. It continues to behave according to narrow partisan interests.

It will probably be the last to realize that the politics it represents so well, the politics of dynasties and patronage, is in deep crisis.

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