Come June 6, some 22 million students will flood the country’s 45,000 public grade and high schools, ready for a brand new year, but the Department of Education estimates that more than 60,000 classrooms are needed to ensure the ideal balance of one classroom for every 45 students. It appears that many students will be learning fractions and proper grammar beneath the trees yet again.

This, while old, dilapidated school buildings, battered by the annual typhoons as well as by wear and tear, cry out in need for care. For the most part, the schools often rely on the parents’ donations for new paint, and the students themselves provide much of the manpower, fixing and preparing the very classrooms they will be using.

But there is hope, and it comes in an amazing communion of intention and deed. Last May 23, the day dawned clear over Bago Bantay Elementary School in Quezon City with the scent of promise and the presence of a great many people.

A long line of over a hundred vehicles rode in after navigating Edsa with colorful balloons and streamers—a motorcade with a purpose. Upon arriving at the school, the gathered people alighted from their vehicles. With them they brought donated construction materials for the school buildings. The crowd, which included Quezon City Mayor Herbert Bautista and Education Secretary Armin Luistro, was there for Brigada Eskwela, perhaps one of the DepEd’s most significant school-opening endeavors.

Brigada Eskwela aims to close the rich-poor gap for needy Filipino students by gathering volunteers from both the government and the private sector, corporate entities and businessmen, diplomats and barangay officials, soldiers and clergy. It involves basically everybody who cares, both the powerful and the everyman. The goal is to assemble manpower to repair, clean and maintain classrooms in those public schools that require it, to take the classes back indoors and away from the trees.

“One important feature of Brigada Eskwela is that we have ordinary people, civil society and nongovernment organizations helping us fulfill our responsibilities to prepare for the school opening,” Luistro told the crowd gathered at the school that morning. “Brigada Eskwela is a new form of people power. All sectors wholeheartedly got involved.”

From its start in 2003, Brigada Eskwela had grown by leaps and bounds nationwide, and all up to May 28, volunteers were descending upon schools all over the country, ready to show with their hands just how much the future of the students mattered to them. From 2003 to 2008, for example, the Brigada Eskwela program had saved the DepEd some P9 billion in maintenance and other expenses. Every year sees thousands of volunteers joining up.

The most impressive thing about Brigada Eskwela is that it accepts only donations of volunteer time and actual construction materials—no monetary donations are accepted. This corruption-free model also promotes community involvement in the schools. Many of the local businesses give their time and donations in kind to the schools located in their own towns and cities, giving a clear sign that they care about their young students.

The coordinated efforts to refurbish our schools call to mind the legendary Filipino bayanihan spirit, where once entire barangays would join forces to literally move houses to other locations within their towns. Now, the bayanihan spirit has reached the schools—to be sure, a most welcome development proving to be very effective and productive.

The reason for that epic size? The black corals that were harvested, said Labe, “are not lush or bushy. They’re found on reef slopes. One piece is equal to one colony,” and only two or three colonies of black corals are found in one hectare of sea bed. Hence, the still unnamed poachers whose seized contraband led to the discovery of the reef destruction had to trawl vast distances of sea bed, wreaking incalculable devastation in their wake, just to gather the 21,169 black coral pieces that were then trussed up, hidden in two container vans and declared as a shipment of rubber, before the smuggling attempt was foiled.

The seized goods, presumably destined for sale abroad to collectors of exotic marine specimens, had an estimated market value of at least P35 million, said Customs Commissioner Angelito Alvarez. That’s a big enough windfall to lure unscrupulous folk with profit in their minds to break the country’s laws against the plunder of rare and endangered marine life in its waters.

As it turns out, it’s not only the promise of vast sums of money that’s driving the shadowy international syndicates behind these illegal activities. They are also being helped, ironically, by the very law that seeks to protect the country’s marine resources—or, more properly, by the lack of teeth of that law. As the militant fisherfolk group Pamalakaya pointed out, the Philippine Fisheries Code of 1998 imposes the lightest of fines and/or jail time for violators, which means poachers with enough money, influence or political clout behind them can easily run rings around the country’s judicial system. “While the law bans the gathering and selling of corals, the punishment of violators is very light, with imprisonment of six months to two years and a fine of P2,000 to P20,000,” said Pamalakaya chair Fernando Hicap.

Contrast those amounts—P2,000 to P20,000—with the estimated value of the coral contraband about to be smuggled out: P35 million. Obviously, the ridiculously outdated fisheries code needs to have its penal provisions strengthened up if the government is to ever begin waging a decent fight against moneyed syndicates preying on the country’s last remaining patches of pristine marine environment.

That is more so because rebuilding the corals’ ecosystem takes a long time. “It took 25 years or even more for these corals to grow… They only grow one centimeter a month,” said Labe. And some of the other animals harvested with the corals were much older—a 40-inch Hawksbill turtle for instance, that was estimated to be 80 to 100 years old. When found, that turtle had become a dead, stuffed ornament. Who in his right mind would prefer to have such a rare, magnificent specimen hanging lifeless in one’s study, gathering dust and stuffed with straw?

But, clearly, there are people who would pay a fortune for it. And now, with this botched smuggling attempt laying bare the shocking pillage of the country’s oceans, the government must throw the book at them, their suppliers, consigners and enablers. Pamalakaya’s demand sounds just right: the Bureau of Customs and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources must do all they can to identify and bring charges against those responsible for the reef destruction off the South Cotabato coast.

Such a brazen and wide-ranging flouting of the law could not have happened without the collusion of people up and down the bureaucratic chain. Who booked the boats that went out to sea? Who paid the locals that undertook the harvesting? Whose warehouse kept the goods and packaged them for shipment? Who in the government regulatory agencies averted their eyes or prepared the paperwork while all this was going on?

If it takes those corals 25 long years to grow back, make sure their human scourges spend at least as much time in jail.

EDITORIAL CARTOON

Presidential Spokesman  Edwin Lacierda says Malacañang is leaving it to public officials to have the “discretion to know what is best for the country (and) what is best for the President.” In the case of Bureau of Corrections director Ernesto Diokno, who has come under fire following the arrest of former Batangas Gov. Antonio Leviste for leaving without permission the New Bilibid Prison where he is serving sentence for the killing of a business associate, Lacierda said he should “consider the public interest” in deciding how to respond to mounting calls for his resignation.

But Malacañang may have to wait a long time before Diokno discovers where his own private interest ends and where the public interest begins. Right now he seems to believe that the two intersect in his keeping the post. Subtle reminders and broad hints that his departure from office would best serve the public interest have gone unheeded by him. Not even a public rebuke from President Aquino, who had plucked him from retirement and appointed him to his present position, would make him leave. All because he professes innocence in the scandal that exposed the special privileges Leviste enjoyed, like “living out” and “sleeping out” of jail, highlighted by his decision to slip out of the prison compound purportedly to seek relief from a painful tooth with his dentist.

Don’t look at me, blame those who serve under me, Diokno has been saying from the day the Leviste visit to his Makati home and office became public. On Wednesday he told the Department of Justice panel investigating the incident that he had heard reports about special privileges granted to some moneyed and influential prisoners and had issued a memorandum directing strict enforcement of prison regulations. But he said he did not monitor if his instructions were followed. “I am not obliged to guard them (prisoners), I am just concerned with policymaking,” he explained.

Senior state prosecutor Susan Dacanay, however, told Diokno that the responsibilities and functions of the BuCor director do not end with crafting policies. She reminded him that the law vests the BuCor director with the responsibility for “the execution of penal policies, plans and programs.” She said: “You are supposed to execute and administer laws … and enforce the rules governing the operations and management of prisons.”

It is either that Diokno is ignorant of what his job entails or he is pleading ignorance to extricate himself from a big jam. But whether one or the other, the fact remains that he has failed in his job and he has failed the President, who is reputedly a friend of his. He has become another embarrassment to an administration that has been successively embarrassed by the mistakes of officials known to be close to Mr. Aquino: Local Government Undersecretary Rico Puno, who was partly blamed for the deadly hostage-taking at the Luneta, and Land Transportation Office chief Virginia Torres, who was enmeshed in a legal dispute over the contract to supply driver’s licenses.

In each of these cases, the President failed to act with the firmness, decisiveness and dispatch expected of him by the public but instead hemmed and hawed and invoked the erring official’s right to due process until the controversy blew over. And in every case, his friends never thought of sparing the President the embarrassment of being blamed somehow for appointing someone who proved unequal to the challenge of the job. It seems that Mr. Aquino has had the bad fortune to be close to people who think friendship is a one-way street.

When Cabinet members get into trouble, they routinely seek sanctuary in the axiom that they serve at the pleasure of the President. Diokno, who occupies a lower position, apparently thinks that even the President’s express displeasure with his performance can simply be ignored.

Mr. Aquino said over the weekend that he was “not happy” with Diokno’s explanations. In appointing officials, he pointed out, trust and confidence are required, and once these are lost, “there is a corresponding action.” Since Diokno cannot take the hint, Mr. Aquino should just tell him straight that he wants him out. Or is he incapable of displeasing friends who have displeased him?

EDITORIAL CARTOON

A PASTORAL letter from Archbishop Socrates Villegas of Lingayen-Dagupan strikes a note not often heard in the controversy over the reproductive health bill pending in Congress: moderation. “We want to make a plea for greater charity even as we passionately state our positions on this divisive issue. At the end of the heated debates, we will all be winners if we proclaim the truths we believe in with utmost charity, courtesy and respect for one another.”

The pastoral statement will only be read in all churches in the archdiocese of Lingayen-Dagupan this Sunday, but already it is making the rounds, passed from hand to hand or e-mail account to e-mail account. It is not hard to see why; the letter is a welcome call for the “triumph of reason and sobriety.” In the same spirit of charity and candor, however, we must point out an unsettling truth: the archbishop’s statement is better directed at some of his fellow bishops and priests who have led the fire-and-brimstone opposition to the RH bill.

Even before the present Congress convened, some leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in the heat of the election campaign last year already issued threats to excommunicate those political candidates who supported a reproductive health agenda. That hostile stance, lacking in the very “charity, courtesy and respect” Archbishop Villegas now speaks of, set the tone for much of the Church’s engagement with the RH bill issue. Since then, the extremist position was reinforced by threat after high-profile threat: of communion being possibly withheld, of churchgoers known for their pro-RH bill position being told they were unwelcome in church, of RH bill advocates being harassed by chants of “Your mother should have aborted you.” While the true Church teaching on the vexing issue of contraception is well-reasoned and even nuanced (as Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks in “Light of the World” proved), the extremist position adopted by a number of bishops and priests and laymen became absurdly reductionist, equating the concept of reproductive health itself with either abortion or licentiousness.

(There is also the not insignificant matter of Villegas’ predecessor, Archbishop Oscar Cruz, adopting a stance against President Aquino that could only be categorized as personal, including his uncharitable notion, certainly not something that will find support in the Church’s teachings, that a man like the President who is past 50 is effectively disqualified from a happy marriage.)

The lack of charity, courtesy and respect touched bottom when a bishop decided it was time to pull out of the high-level dialogue with Malacañang, because Malacañang, he said, was no longer open to discussion. In fact it is the bishops who can be accused of inflexibility in position.

Thus, when Villegas writes the following—“The past few months have seen many of us who belong to the same Church and who share the same faith in Christ at odds with one another on the issue of the reproductive health bill in Congress. It is indeed sad and perhaps even scandalous for non-Christians to see the Catholic flock divided among themselves and some members of the Catholic lay faithful at odds with their own pastors. If we fail to have love, we make ourselves orphans.”—charity and candor impel us to point out that sometimes the orphaning is done by the pastors themselves.

We do not wish to suggest that the Villegas pastoral letter can be interpreted as being pro-RH bill. The good bishop’s appeal to a return to conscience is based squarely on the serene conviction that the right thing to do is to oppose the bill. “We pray conscience does not allow itself to be swayed by statistics or partisan political positions. The only voice conscience must listen to is the voice of God.” Elsewhere he also writes: “The issue of contraception belongs to the realm of faith not opinions.”

But he exemplifies his own appeal for reasoned debate, and it is a call we should heed. “We appeal to our Catholic brethren who stand on opposing sides on the reproductive health bill to return to the voice of conscience, to state their positions and rebut their opponents always with charity.” Now that is something all Filipino Catholics can agree on.

“The AFP, after thorough deliberation, has validated and confirmed … the sighting of two unidentified jet aircraft in the vicinity of the Kalayaan Island Groups in the Western Philippine Seas Wednesday,” a statement from the Armed Forces read. The statement clarified that the aircraft did not take any action that could be interpreted as hostile. There “could not have been provocation,” the AFP said—except that the intrusion itself was provocation enough.

While Reed Bank is not itself in dispute, the Kalayaan Islands or the Spratlys further west are very much in the center of a claims controversy, with several countries, including China, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines, claiming part or all of it. And while other countries have not been shy about establishing physical, military presence in the disputed areas, China has been the most assertive. It is only to be expected, therefore, that when news about the reported intrusion spread, China seemed to be the likeliest culprit. And we repeat: It doesn’t seem possible that such an intrusion could have been allowed without express authorization from higher-ups.

Chinese Defense Minister Liang Guanglie directly addressed the issue during his Manila visit, which ends today. As the Associated Press reported: “Liang, according to Gazmin, mentioned that Philippine media accounts identified the two aircraft as Russian-made MIG fighter jets and clarified that China has no MIG planes in its air force.”

Perhaps there are no longer working MIG planes in the Chinese air force; perhaps the Philippine OV-10 pilots who sighted the fighter jets misidentified them. This is a detail that is subject to verification. There should be no question, however, that China in recent years (and contrary to its avowed emerging-superpower policy of a “peaceful rise”) has become increasingly assertive in pursuing what it calls its historical claim to the Spratlys.

As President Aquino himself noted the other day, the Philippines has recorded “many and different sightings and various other vessels” under the Chinese flag in the disputed areas. Just last March 2, two Chinese Navy ships harassed a Philippine oil exploration ship near Reed Bank. The Philippines later filed a formal protest with the United Nations.

(The very notion of a historical claim should be thoroughly questioned, since its reasoning would place a now completely independent country like, say, Vietnam under that over-broad Chinese policy.)

The timing of the visit of Liang, the man in daily charge of the world’s largest standing army, is of some moment; it comes just a few days after the powerful American carrier strike group led by the USS Carl Vinson, after burying the remains of al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden, stopped over in Manila—a vigorous sign of US force projection into a zone of influence that China wants increasingly to call its own.

The official outcome of his visit is even more important: Liang and Gazmin issued a statement promising to avoid “unilateral actions” that would heighten the Spratlys dispute. (The statement, in truth, can also be read as a warning to other claimants to avoid similar actions.) This is a useful reaffirmation of the spirit behind the Code of Conduct, the 2002 agreement entered into by China and the Asean member-states.

But we must point out the uncomfortable truth: Tensions over the Spratlys in recent years have been the direct result of China’s muscle-flexing. The harassment, the intrusion, the assertive language have all been coming from one side. The Chinese call for “restraints,” therefore, strikes us as a little like the schoolyard bully, under watchful eyes, making nice.

Diokno’s nonchalance reveals the blasé attitude that has been fostered by a corrections system that renders justice according to the social status and the gravity of the wallet of the convict: the higher the social status and the fatter the wallet, the more special the treatment of the prisoner. (Of course all the rest of the prisoners with zero social status and negative income get the full brunt of justice, as they should of course.) But with VIP prisoners getting VIP treatment from prison wardens, where’s the justice in all of this?

As Puerto Princesa Bishop Pedro Arigo said, the special treatment of VIPs and other iniquities have been there for decades. “There’s a culture of impunity where if one is rich, influential and powerful, one can get away from detention, such as what has happened to (Leviste) and former Zamboanga del Norte Rep. Romeo Jalosjos,” he said on Radyo Veritas. Arigo, who chairs the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines-Episcopal Commission on Prison Pastoral Care, said corruption in the penal system is “easy to understand” because rich convicts are known to use their money and influence “as early as during their trial.” Once convicted and sentenced, they would parley their social status and financial weight for special treatment in jail, which prison wardens all too readily grant them. Wealthy convicts, for example, are allowed air-conditioning. “I see many such instances because I go to Muntinlupa,” the bishop said. “I won’t make them public, but that’s what is sad in our criminal justice system at present. The reality is, if you’re poor and money-less, you don’t have any influence and you’re pitiful. But if you’re rich, influential and have connections, even if you go to jail, you get VIP treatment.”

De Lima said the special treatment of rich and influential prisoners has been an “open secret.” Coming from a member of the bar and a justice professional who has been laboring under the criminal justice system for some time, the remark is shocking. What have the different pillars of the justice system been doing all along to check and correct our twisted, porous corrections system? De Lima has ordered, for example, a comprehensive review of the Revised Penal Code to make its statutes more attuned to the new century, but the review may take some time. What she should have ordered instead is an immediate review of the penal and prisons management system to stop it from according special treatment to influential prisoners.

To her credit, it was De Lima who ordered the arrest of Leviste near the LPL building in Makati, which he owns. She has also ordered the review of security arrangements inside the NBP compound, including the prison guards’ use of cell phones. She said she had received information that an inmate who ordered the killing of BuCor Assistant Director Rodrigo Mercado gave the order from a cell phone obtained through a prison guard. Apparently, some enterprising guards have been “renting out” their cell phones to prisoners, De Lima said. Although prisoners are prohibited from using cell phones, she said, mobile devices have been recovered during prison raids. There’s also a drug problem inside the NBP, she added.

Leviste’s arrest has opened a can of worms, as did earlier prison scandals involving powerful and wealthy inmates. The task before De Lima and the justice department is to put a stop to the cozy relationship that exists between jailer and jailed, fire prison officials who have fostered it, and reform the penal system. Other needed measures, such as the rehabilitation of our jails so that the justice system would be truly rehabilitative, not putative, would obviously take some time to carry out. But the overhaul should start now.

PRESIDENT BENIGNO AQUINO III’S appointment of running mate Mar Roxas as chief of staff still needs an enabling administrative order, but it has already stirred the proverbial hornet’s nest. Much of the criticism seems to be ultimately based on the notion that, because Roxas lost the vice-presidential race, he should not be appointed to political office. This is a narrow view of political responsibility, based on the over-broad position that defeated candidates have been “rejected by the people.”

Is it in fact the case that election losers should not be named to appointive offices at all? We cannot find a sanction for this extreme view either in the Constitution or in a hundred years of Philippine politics. There is, however, an excellent constitutional provision imposing a temporary, one-year ban; contrary to what one may expect, this provision is found not in the section governing elections or in the section on the accountability of public officers, but in the section providing for a stronger civil service.

Article IX, Part B, Section 6 reads: “No candidate who has lost in any election shall, within one year after such election, be appointed to any office in the Government or any Government-owned or controlled corporations or in any of their subsidiaries.”

Now why is that? The provision is meant to safeguard government service, by preventing it from being turned into a catch-all for suddenly jobless politicians. But if that is the case, why limit the ban to one year? Because democracy itself is sustained by a firm belief in the second chance. One year ought to be enough time for a defeated candidate to learn the lessons of defeat; for the burden of ordinary citizenship to leave an imprint on an ex-politician; above all, for public opinion to begin to change its mind.

To be sure, there is a type of appointment that should not be made even after the one-year ban: When a defeated candidate is appointed to a position that undermines the intent of the election that sent him to his defeat. A mayor turned out of city hall, for example, should not be appointed to an office that would allow him to counter the work of his successor. To sharpen the example: A defeated candidate for either mayor of Olongapo or a congressional district in Zambales should not be named chair of the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority, which plays an inordinate role in local politics, before the next election; that would be to mock the electorate in Olongapo or Zambales.

The case with defeated candidates for national office is a little more ambiguous. It did not seem right then, and it still doesn’t seem right now, that Gloria Arroyo appointed defeated senatorial candidate Prospero Pichay to head the Local Water Utilities Administration; the loyal Pichay was merely being rewarded for spending millions of his money on a futile bid for the Senate. If Sen. Manny Villar had won the presidency, should he have appointed (badly) beaten senatorial candidate Satur Ocampo to high office? Considering that the two candidates sometimes found themselves at cross-purposes during the campaign, the answer would seem to be: It depends on the office. (Here’s an intriguing counter-factual: What if Ocampo were appointed chair of the Commission on Human Rights?)

Appointment as reward; appointee as aligned policy-wise with the appointing power. Perhaps we can use these two touchstones as one measure with which to determine whether an appointment should be welcomed or not. The naming of a defeated candidate as a political reward (payback, is the long and short of it) runs counter to the public interest; on the other hand, the naming of a defeated candidate because he shares the exact same political views of the President and is bound to the same commitments the President campaigned on, is to honor the President’s own election mandate.

It is on this basis that Roxas’ entry into the President’s official family should be understood: He has a role to play in fulfilling the campaign promises he and President Aquino made.

There is of course the possibility that the unfortunate division of the higher echelons of the Aquino administration into two factions will be exacerbated with the appointment. That is the President’s own lookout. But, in truth, the crisis is inevitable; either there will be an all-out confrontation, or reconciliation. If Roxas’re-appearance on the scene will hasten the moment of resolution, then so be it.

All that President Benigno Aquino had wanted was a good night out with a friend—in a reunion concert of the band Hotdog—but he discovered that there was no eluding the all-encompassing attention of the Filipino media. When the image of the President sitting at a table with a pretty face got around the next day, the President’s men at Malacañang tried to evade the questions, which only further stoked interest in the mystery woman. The scrutiny was almost supernatural, and Ms Calica found herself on front pages, her name now included in the short list of single women who had been seen with Mr. Aquino.

As always, Mr. Aquino thornily faced down the inquiries, refusing to answer questions about his date. “That is my business, and if I can answer it this way, perhaps I can be treated as an ordinary man,” he said when asked about it a few days later. “That matter is private. I feel that many times my rights have been diminished. It is too much to explain.”

This was not the first time President Aquino had dealt with the bizarre balance of being the President of the Philippines and being a bachelor, in fact, the only single person to be elected so. He is history in motion. Media and the public have been enthralled by any kind of looming change in Mr. Aquino’s romantic status quo from day one—something that he seems to actively despise. He just doesn’t seem to get it.

Once and for all, he himself has to come to terms with the fact that his private life is really public property. Whether he likes it or not, his every outing with a female friend will be reported in print, on TV and on the Internet. Every one of his possible and, hopefully, actual girlfriends will be researched and written about. But it isn’t because the public begrudges him a private life. He has to understand that the scrutiny comes with the job, and that it is not all sharp-toothed gossip. A great many among those who follow his love life are concerned for him as well as genuinely excited by his prospects.

It’s not too far removed from the combination of adulation and nosiness that came attached to the British royal couple Prince William and Kate Middleton shortly before and certainly during their wedding at Westminster Abbey. Should Mr. Aquino choose to marry during his time in office, it would be the biggest wedding in recent Philippine history, and undoubtedly it will be met with incredible interest as well as media coverage down to the tiniest detail and most mundane element.

In the meantime, the President just has to run the country and eke out as well some measure of a social life, taking in the occasional movie and the rarest of dates. In the scant times that he has spoken about this, it is clear that he actually seems to understand part of the reason behind the scrutiny—he just rejects that reason outright.

At the most, it is willfully belligerent and at the very least, greatly disingenuous for him to expect that he could be elected by a landslide to chart the country’s future without constantly being under the microscope of an entire society. “As you know I am still single. If I ever get a chance to go out on a date, it seems that I have invited the entire Filipino people to join me on that date,” Mr. Aquino said. “And I wonder who gave them the right, and why I am apologizing to whoever had the misfortune of joining me in that circus.”

That circus came with the people’s vote. President Aquino must accept, it comes with the job—and take it to heart that, despite how it may initially seem, all the Filipinos are actually rooting for him to find lasting love.

He will never be an ordinary man again, and while there is a level of privacy accorded even to his romances, it is limited by the fact that he is president. The people have the right to know whom he is going out with and whoever goes out with him. They have the right to know who their next First Lady may be. Mr. Aquino will just have to accept the massive burden of a country wanting to know everything about him for all the remaining strange days of his presidency.

Among the many voices that have joined the irate public chorus calling for accountability and punitive action for this irregularity is the National Food Authority Employees’ Association (NFAEA), which, through Courage, the umbrella organization of government employees to which it belongs, denounced the NFA loss as a case of “the people [being] robbed not just twice, but thrice.” It also demanded that “heads should not only roll but the billions of pesos should be justly returned to the people.”

The heads in question are those of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her NFA officials, under whose watch the agency over-imported rice, apparently tolerated a cartel of rice traders that hoarded government permits to import the crop, made wildly inaccurate estimates of the country’s food requirements, and mismanaged stocks, leading to the heinous spectacle of rotting grains in the NFA’s warehouses while the country’s destitute scraped and begged for their daily sustenance.

Not surprisingly, corruption, ineptness and inefficiency led to the absurd fact that, in the twilight of the Arroyo administration, the Philippines would become the world’s biggest importer of rice—and yet still be plagued by rice shortages and price fluctuations.

The NFA employees’ union, which has mounted a vigorous campaign to dissuade the government from abolishing the agency following revelations of its insolvency, is well within its right to call for punishment and public redress in this case. But it must also be pointed out: The NFA employees now raising their voices were right deep inside the organization that committed these anomalies. The NFA’s losses were incurred over a period of 10 long years. Members of the union were all over the NFA bureaucracy even as the agency was spiraling into meltdown. So, to use that classic Nixonian question: What did they know, and when did they know it?

Because, let’s face it, a loss of P100 billion over 10 years could not have been accomplished by shady top-level officials alone, unless we grant them superhuman powers of subterfuge and trickery. No, they couldn’t have acted on their own. Papers had to be typed, moved along, greased into the next desk before any abnormal transaction could have ensued. How many colluded, or at the very least averted their eyes?

Those rotting mountains of rice in the bodega—who were tasked to watch over them, and why was no alarm raised for so long? The virtual mini-army of bookkeepers tasked to pore over receipts and invoices—how come they didn’t see that, in 2009 alone, the NFA reported it had lost 7.79 million kilos of rice due allegedly to “short-landing spillage in uploading and transfer of stocks from one warehouse to another”? In short, as sacks of rice were moved around, the grains were tumbling out to the tune of millions of kilos! Incredible. But it had to take an independent government audit group to raise a howl over it. Not a peep from an NFA employee.

Instead, for some baffling reason, the NFA employees’ association, rather than working to expose and rid its own agency of the corruption and waste that have now put its very members’ employment at risk, seems to prefer dabbling in outré conspiracy theories. In a paper it put out opposing the NFA’s abolition, it said the United States was behind the move, that the establishment of the International Rice Research Institute and the development of “miracle rice” were proof of “the imperialist hand at work in trying to manipulate and effect rice trade liberalization in the (sic) developing countries like the Philippines.”

In the private sector, a company that sinks into the red by the billions would be shuttered without a blink. But, in this case, a government agency does likewise due to massive rot from within—and don’t let anyone claim it’s the handiwork of a few bad apples at the top—and the rank-and-file vents its ire at that old bogeyman, US imperialism. Huh? If the NFA union wants to be taken seriously, it should, instead, begin looking at its own responsibility in this mess.

The findings seem to confirm public suspicion about NFA incompetence and corruption, and especially of its mismanagement of rice imports in the last few years, which led to record high prices and the unfortunate label of world’s largest rice importer.

Key findings of the audit team outlined a pattern of cartelization. Despite a first-come, first-served policy, some importers managed to receive permits to import even though they were not first in line. “Apparently, the PSF importation was centrally orchestrated in violation of the NFA first-come, first-served rule and rationale of PSF. NFA utilized the first-come first-served rule for favored bidders,” the audit report said.

The use of similar names and of made-up corporate entities was also telltale signs of orchestrated fraud. “The names of contact persons on the manager’s checks submitted by different companies to the NFA were also the same,” the first part of the Inquirer’s Special Report read. Some of the companies taking part in the initiative turned out to be fictitious.

And even when different names were used, different companies would submit manager’s checks bearing consecutive serial numbers. “It’s too much of a coincidence,” the audit team commented.

The PSF initiative involved a total of 18 trading companies or multi-purpose cooperatives. The 10 from Pangasinan were Sta. Rosa Farm Products Corp., Pure Feeds Corp., Longos Proper MPC, Hillside MPC, Unzad MPC, Cabaritan MPC, La Tupiguera MPC, Pasileng Sur MPC, Eastern Binalonan MPC and D’Highlight Agri-Business MPC. The eight from Cebu included Radegonda Vallejo, Chevy Bacaltos, Edisa Cabuenas, Jugy Obando, Jerome Tan, Othoniel Acquiatan, Marivic Ventura and Glenn Ernesto Pacana.

There’s more. The importers paid the NFA a service fee to receive the license to import, but by some bureaucratic sleight of hand, most of these fees were returned to the traders, apparently as incentive. “Service fees, originally intended as revenue collection of NFA and for the purpose of equalizing the pricing gap of NFA import relative to PSF import were refunded at liberal discretion of NFA,” the report said. In 2010 alone, the 18 traders paid P400 million in service fees; almost three-fourths of that, or P298 million, was refunded.

And yet these and other telltale signs of a rice cartel, which set the government back by billions of pesos, were not the only “red flags” discovered by the audit team. While the NFA allowed the traders to process the imports in the NFA’s name, the agency itself had “no oversight or regulatory leverage on disposition of imports.” Until lately, it did not even know whether a particular shipment had arrived or not.

The traders were also allowed to sell the rice they brought in using NFA subsidies at commercial rates. “[A] PSF importer enjoys the same subsidy as NFA gets for its direct import, but PSF parties sell theirs at commercial prices and keep the profits entirely for themselves, duty and tax-free.”

But that wasn’t the worst, as the Inquirer story noted: “The report said the country’s purchase of rice in the last decade was marred by wrong timing, over-importation, off-the-mark estimates of per capita consumption and poor rice intelligence and management, which all contributed to the price increases, shortage and mounting debts.”

How, one may ask, did such things come to pass? We share the belief of many that it was the Arroyo administration’s culture of unmoderated greed that led to such large-scale, systematic plunder. Greed ran rampant because even questionable policies and bureaucracies-turned-cartels were protected by an expansive notion of the so-called presumption of regularity. That the obvious anomalies in the case of the PSF went on for almost three years virtually undetected is proof that plunder was, during those years, a regular thing.