Four months before his term expires, President Duterte says he has begun packing. We commend his readiness to leave office to make way for his successor, who will be elected into office on May 9. We only wish that when Mr. Duterte leaves, he takes with him the barnacles in his administration who are in office only by virtue of his misplaced sense of gratitude to them and their blind loyalty to him.
Indeed, after almost six years in power, if Mr. Duterte has proven one thing, it is this: it is a great disservice to the Filipino people for a politician to repay his debts by appointing unqualified followers to government positions.
We have already witnessed the unfortunate results in the Pharmally mess, where a former volunteer election lawyer in his 2016 presidential campaign was appointed to head the Procurement Office of the Department of Budget and Management, then approved P11 billion worth of contracts to buy, with no public bidding, pandemic supplies from an under-capitalized start-up with no track record, but which had a presidential friend as its financier. The upshot is that the government used public funds to buy face masks, face shields and personal protective equipment at prices higher than those prevailing at the time, to the country’s ultimate disadvantage.
Other appointees have sought to do damage in other ways. Those who pack the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), for example, chip away at academic freedom with book bans in universities. Now, the agency’s spokesperson is threatening to take legal action against the online news service Rappler for fact-checking her statement.
The statement in question came from NTF-ELCAC spokesperson Lorraine Badoy, who said the Makabayan bloc who wrote House Bill No. 10576 or the Human Rights Defenders Protection Act, were urban operatives of the Communist Party of the Philippines, and its military wing the New People’s Army.
Contradicting this statement, Rappler said Makabayan is a political coalition accredited by the Commission on Elections, and its member organizations have been allowed to participate in the party list for several elections as they meet the criteria under the Party-List System Act.
This led Badoy to announce a government plan to sue Facebook, Rappler and Vera Files, saying their fact checking was a form of intimidation and harassment.
Of course, Badoy knows a thing or two about intimidation and harassment. After all, this was the same presidential appointee who, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and amid all the economic hardship it caused, accused organizers of charitable community pantries of being communist agents.
Now she apparently wants to stop the press from checking her “facts.”
We can hardly wait to send appointees such as this packing—the sooner, the better.