The drip, the drizzle, and the deluge of doing nothing
You might suppose that a scandal involving stolen pesos to pave the archipelago in gold leaf would provoke a certain eagerness in the halls of power. You would be wrong. You would be the kind of sentimental fool who still believes a congressman’s promise is worth the damp paper it’s printed on.
In early April, Ombudsman Jesus Crispin Remulla announced that plunder charges would be filed against former Senate President Francis “Chiz” Escudero and former House Speaker Martin Romualdez. “There was a conspiracy,” he said. Splendid. The wheels of justice, long rusted into immobility, gave a single creak.
The charges will be filed in May. Why not April? Why not last year? Because that is not how the game is played. The press conference is the sacrament. The actual filing is an afterthought.
And while the Ombudsman speaks, the pit listens. Have we forgotten Zaldy Co, the former Ako Bicol party list representative, who slipped out like a fish through a torn net? Have we forgotten Charlie “Atong” Ang, who vanished amid a fog of talk about arrest warrants? Now that Remulla has kindly announced his intentions a full month in advance, one might ask: what steps have been taken to prevent Escudero and Romualdez from following them to some pleasant villa in a nonextradition country?
But let us not be too harsh. The prosecutors are drowning. The Independent Commission for Infrastructure dumped 197 mega boxes of documents onto its doorstep. That is not an investigation; it is a moving company’s nightmare.
And what tools has Congress given them? The Ombudsman’s 2026 budget is P6.39 billion, a sum that sounds large until you recall the stolen amount runs to tens of billions. The Sandiganbayan operates on a shoestring. The Commission on Audit (COA) asked for P16.21 billion; the Senate subpanel gave them P15.07 billion. A cut. After a trillion-peso scandal. You cannot invent this satire; you can only report it.
And what of Congress itself? That noble body, whose members have been mentioned in investigations with the frequency of names in a police blotter, has done precisely nothing. Not one law to strengthen the COA. Not one law to fund the Ombudsman. Not one law to reform the budget process that made this whole stinking mess possible.
The independent anticorruption commission begged Congress to create a permanent body. Congress nodded solemnly and returned to approving the 2026 budget, which left the “pork system” entirely intact. The same system. The same invitation to theft.
You see, dear reader, the men and women in Congress are not stupid. They know that if you truly wanted to end corruption, you would fund the investigators and strip the budget of discretionary slush funds. But that would be like asking a thief to lock the door. And so, they do nothing. They issue statements. They “respect the process.” And the flood control money keeps flowing, if not to the same contractors, then to their cousins, their donors, their future campaign contributors.
The Anti-Money Laundering Council has frozen P27.8 billion in assets and filed civil forfeiture cases. That is real money. That is progress. But it is the progress of a man who has stopped the bleeding from a severed artery by applying a single Band-Aid. The cases will take years. The plunder charges, once filed, will face endless motions. By the time a verdict is reached, the accused will be old, dead, or living comfortably in a country with no extradition treaty.
A famous American novelist once wrote that the average American is a prude and a hypocrite. He might have said the same of the average Filipino politician, substituting only the nationality. We hold press conferences. We announce charges. And then we go home, secure in the knowledge that nothing fundamental will change.
Do not hold your breath, gentle reader. The wheels of justice turn slowly here. And the men who could oil them are the very same men who profit from the rust.
Manny Ilao,
manny.ilao@yahoo.com
