WITHOUT doubt, officials, in both executive and legislative branches of government, saw the revulsion of a wakened and angered people in the different anti-corruption protests earlier this week.
They must now be aware that something positive must be done beyond the initial separate investigations conducted in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Such investigations have helped unmask the shameless characters, their forward lies, finger pointing, their discovered guile, who have scammed a trusting populace that, typhoons and all, they would not be awakened by rampaging and rising floodwaters as well as pulled off school building rooftops.
Such floodwaters could not have been as furious and unforgiving if the millions, nay billions, intended for flood control projects and rehabilitation of dilapidated school buildings had been spent for these.
But many, in both the executive and legislative branches, with a sleight of covetous hands, aided by their now identified and still to be named collaborators, made insertions where possible, persuaded by the thought they would not and would never be found out.
But alas, and sadly for them, their cunning moves in dark zones of an unsuspecting night and a gullible broad daylight eventually showed them up ii discovered “ghost” projects and pictures of bundles of bills in the billions of pesos, not to mention upmarket wheels and upscale mansions and condominiums.
The billions should have been for the welfare of the previously uncomplaining public, humored to be tough and buoyant in face of natural disasters.
But they have been cheated with their hard-earned tax payments they discovered rather late had changed hands among the brazenly corrupt as from more than a decade back.
What is clear at this point is those insensitively venal kept on playing their cards for years in the mistaken belief that public service, with assistance from similarly insatiable private contractors, is a private trust.
As the Latin maxim says, salus furum est lex suprema.
They were blindedly convinced the welfare of the thieves is the supreme law.
But the angered population cannot and must not be angry forever, with the Independent Commission for Infrastructure or ICI already past the pre-heat mode.
At this point, the investigators in both houses of Congress – where at times unmannerly syllables have been exchanged among their honors – must stop forthwith.
They must allow the ICI to do its job, submit to it for appreciation whatever papers they have gathered during the initial investigations, and let it determine who should be covered by the government’s witness protection program and who must be prosecuted.
The ICI must be supported by the people, by everyone, and let it throw the book on those who deserve not just the letter but the spirit of the law.
The ICI, now keenly watched by the disgusted and cheated population, must do nothing less.
