HEARTENING that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has created a three-member independent fact-finding body to probe alleged irregularities in government flood control and other infrastructure projects.
The President’s Executive Order 94, made public on Thursday, more than three weeks after he went ballistic during an inspection tour of reported completed but were in fact “ghost” flood control projects in flooded Bulacan, cited threats to public safety and erosion of public trust.
The order permits the Independent Commission for Infrastructure to “recommend to or request from the appropriate authorities the freezing or seizure of assets, funds, deposits and properties reasonably believed to be connected to anomalous flood control and other infrastructure projects pending investigation.
The body may transfer evidence and findings to appropriate prosecutorial authorities for expeditious prosecution and recommend to authorities the immediate preventive suspension of any public official or employee as it may find necessary to prevent the tampering of evidence or influencing of witnesses during its investigation.
To support its investigation, the ICI may invite and collaborate with public officials or private individuals “of recognized competence and integrity” and with “established knowledge and expertise in governance, transparency, and accountability” and designate them as special adviser or other capacities.
Public hearings by the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee, apart from inquiries similarly launched by the House of Representatives, have steadily corroded the public trust in the unabashed private contractors, Public Works Highways officials and district engineers who identified some legislators in the alleged corruption in flood control projects, an accusation the legislators named denied.
Also out in the open is a creepy conflict of interest with flood control projects, with COA Chairperson Gamaliel Cordoba admitting Commissioner Mario Lipana’s wife Marilou Laurio is the president and general manager of a construction firm that actively bags flood control contracts from the DPWH.
Like the masses gasping for life under relentless floodwaters ghost projects have failed to check, we hope the ICI will not just get the knuckles of those guilty rapped but punished to the extent commensurate to their crimes, whatever crimes under existing laws they may be.
We are confident those who will be appointed to the ICI are persons of probity, those with honor, integrity and rectitude.
Whlle everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty, the masses are not that empty-headed nor feeble-minded.
We hold the hope, while waiting for swift and sweet result of the ICI investigations, the suffering masses, deceived and exploited excessively long by contractors and their partners in crime, will not lose their self-restraint and sense of humor.
For if they do, the echoes of Raul Manglapus’ oration in 1939 may once more ricochet: “For I who have been silent…will come in the night when you are feasting, with my cry and my bolo at your door. And may God have mercy on your soul!”
