“Why shower honoraria for mere attendance, and more for grandstanding inquisitors?”
Last Wednesday, I was switching between a Netflix series and the Quad Comm hearings which featured former President Rodrigo Roa Duterte as its main resource speaker.
After hearing the opening statements of the chairpersons, I switched to Netflix, occasionally returning only when a friend would text some “interesting” portions of the marathon hearing.
What immediately caught my attention was that unlike in the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee hearing where Duterte was separated from former Senator Leila de Lima by the former head of PDEA, in the Quad Comm hearing, they were seated side by side. Purposely, as if the secretariat or the chairpersons themselves wanted to play a trick on one or both.
Chairman Bienvenido Abante had an interesting revelation. He recounted a meeting at the Fairmont Hotel in Makati between the island-hopping Davao City mayor in 2015, when the latter had yet to declare his candidacy for president.
I was the one who arranged that short encounter. A common friend told me that the religious group headed by the Abante brothers had a sizable number of followers who might be won over by Duterte. And so I requested then closest aide Bong Go to insert the meeting when the mayor would be in Manila.
But that is mere trivia which the Manila congressman used to premise his “fairness” with the former president that his other colleagues grilled.
Nothing in last Wednesday’s hearing achieved anything that the Senate hearing had already elicited, despite what critics described as their being extra nice to the former president.
Duterte merely re-stated that he was ready to face whatever charges this government and the victims’ kin wished to prosecute in the courts of law.
All those repetitive questions propounded by the legal “luminaries,” licensed or not by the Supreme Court as officers of the law, served no purpose than to highlight the conclusions they wanted to project and has become the be-all and end-all of all those interminable hearings. The hearing were so cut-and-pasted that switching to Netflix was a more enjoyable pasttime.
Every member of the committees merely wanted to have their precious ten minutes of “fame” before the live telecast. I wonder what their constituents would say about their imagined perspicacity, or from this writer’s viewpoint, some of their idiotic “kakulitan”.
All for show and all in pursuit of the demolition of the Duterte political brand at the altar of other familial ambitions in this dynasty-ridden system we call our democracy.
What more do they want?
The former president has time and again repeated his declaration that he is accepting legal and even moral responsibility for the effects of his drug war policy.
He has further stated that cases could be filed against him in the courts of law, or even, a new twist in the Quad Comm’s Wednesday soiree, asking the ICC to come over and do their thing, the moving timeline predicted by the pinklawans not yet materializing.
In short, bring it all on, and hurry up!
So why waste taxpayer money on these hearings? Why shower honoraria for mere attendance, and more for grandstanding inquisitors?
As postscript, the inquisitors wanted to terminate the hearing earlier, while their resource person declared that he could stay till the wee hours. Feigning pity for an old man pestered by their repetitive questions, our honorables really just wanted to attend the birthday party of their leader.
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Today would have marked the 96th birthday of former Vice-President Salvador Hidalgo Laurel, the statesman who painstakingly forged a coalition among major political parties and groupings under the umbrella of the United Nationalist Democratic Organization (UNIDO), and who in his stint at the Senate which was cut short by martial law, passed the Justice for the Poor laws that institutionalized free legal assistance to poor citizens of the republic who face charges in our courts of law.
In a rare act of nobility which has become increasingly obsolete in this age of insatiable greed and dynastic entitlements, Laurel’s sacrifice of personal and party interests for the sake of a united front that eventually triumphed over the authoritarian regime, will be forever enshrined in the annals of our political history.
Details of Laurel’s sacrifice and the betrayal of terms of agreement, of “palabra de honor” as his older brother, the late Speaker Jose Bayani Laurel Jr. liked to say, are part of a book the first draft of which I have already submitted to my editor, hopefully to be published at a future date.
