Bilibid or not, Noynoy is merely shocked

I am shocked that Noynoy Aquino is shocked by what were discovered in a raid inside the national penitentiary in Bilibid. As president of the country, Noynoy is privileged to have access to all sorts of information, including those not normally available to the average person like you and me. If I here in faraway Cebu have heard of stories about what goes on behind the thick walls of Bilibid, surely Noynoy must have heard even more, and in much greater detail.

So Noynoy should not try to play coy and say he was shocked by what Leila de Lima has uncovered. On the matter of guns alone, I do not think a gun enthusiast like Noynoy can remain clueless for so long about the kinds of weapons that get smuggled into Bilibid. Maybe the relevance of guns in Bilibid can get lost in the context of the storytelling. But I can never ever believe no story of the sort ever filtered all the way up to Malacañang.

What I think happened was that all the shenanigans in Bilibid have become so common that people now take them for granted. So unless he was sufficiently primed to spot something amiss, Noynoy would not likely digress from the context in which any stories of guns in Bilibid were told to him. If they were told in the context of caliber and firepower, or prices and availability, he would likely miss the point of their being criminal inside Bilibid.

In other words, Noynoy would be just like everybody else, no stranger to what goes on inside Bilibid, but grown accustomed by regularity to ignore them until something happens that is particularly jolting, such as the de Lima raid, which in itself was not prompted by her own sudden discovery or awareness but by something else that I leave to her critics to expound.

The network giant ABS-CBN has been beating its own breast as having run the expose that prompted the raid. Unless his communications team had been sleeping, it would have alerted the president already about the potential fallout from the expose even before de Lima conducted her raid. That being the presumption, the president would have little or no room for shock when the expose did explode on de Lima's raid.

But I will not nitpick on the credibility of Noynoy's shock, or his capacity for genuine reaction to anything that goes on under his watch. I just could not believe he would invoke a shock reaction for something I could not believe he does not know already. You only get shocked the first time you know of something. And I do not think it was the first time Noynoy, the president of the republic, ever heard of Bilibid and what goes on inside it.

Anyway, I am secondarily shocked that a development that happened so quickly can suddenly proceed so slowly. After virtually flying off the starting line with the discovery of everything -- from guns to millions, music studios to jacuzzis, drugs to hospital receipts, condoms to gadgets, etc etc -- the officials who are supposed to be fried instantly are still appearing everyday on tv, all harping on the same theme of innocence and inculpability.

Worse, there is now an attempt to distract the public, to detract attention away from the core issues involving Bilibid. A new twist has been added to the sordid story. It is now being reported in all of media that some of the high powered guns discovered in the raid on Bilibid are in the names of politicians. This is a clear red herring thrown to mask the original scent with that of politics.

Nothing in this country is as intoxicating as the smell of politics. Throw politics into any mix and it is the one that ultimately prevails. I now suspect that the introduction of politics into the picture is a deliberate attempt to muddle the issue and throw public attention away from the core issue, which is that Bilibid is everything that it is not supposed to be.

How can the government allow such a problem as Bilibid to fester. Many of the criminals inside continue to run the drug, robbery and kidnapping syndicates that make the lives of all people outside miserable? How can the government ignore the fact that continued operations of these criminal syndicates have reached a level of pervasiveness that they now constitute a real national security threat, something that is now a matter for direct presidential intervention?

And yet, is that all that we can expect to hear from Noynoy? That he was shocked? Why hasn't he fired anyone? What is he waiting for? That no one has even offered to resign indicates an unwillingness to submit to the reforms that Noynoy has been trying to sell to anyone who cares to listen. If Noynoy goes along with that unwillingness, then that only proves his own lack of sincerity in pursuing those reforms.

There is no need for an investigation. The sheer volume, variety, type and nature of the things discovered in the Bilibid raid are enough to start firing people. If even just a tenth of what was discovered happened to involve or implicate an enemy of Noynoy, I am pretty sure he would hit the roof not just in anger but in manic desire to exact the most painful and insulting toll.

[email protected].