Cayetano versus Enrile: why a Senate self-destruction will ultimately be good for the Philippines

January 24, 2013

by benign0

You can’t blame old fogey Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile for trying the old Pinoy style sidestep-the-issue-then-lay-out-a-Joker-card trick when painted into a corner. That’s exactly what he did responding to very clear and specific issues raised by Senator Alan Peter Cayetano during a speech he delivered before his colleagues around the need for a private audit of Senate finances…

[Cayetano] challenged Enrile to show how the Senate has been liquidating its funds, which he said doubled during Enrile’s term.

He said that the Senate budget for [Maintenance and Other Operating Expenses (MOOE)] went up from P750 million to P1.5 billion, of which P428 million is given to oversight panels and P1 million in MOOE to senators.

“Ang matitira po sa senado a little over P600 million. So my question Mr. Senate President, [how is this P600 million liquidated]? I was told a big part of this is being liquidated by certification,” Cayetano said.

Enrile is a nine-decade-old Filipino. So his debating faculties tend to mirror the society he grew old with. Flashing some sort of document as he began his response to Cayetano’s speech, Enrile brought up a 37 million peso debt allegedly owed by Cayetano’s deceased father payment for which, Enrile says, was not demanded for the sake of friendship and in considering the late Cayetano’s need to feed his family.

Presumably recognising that this was outside the scope of the issue being discussed, Enrile said as he folded the document and began to slip it into his breast pocket, “but let’s not focus on this and put this matter aside.”

Why bring it up then? That’s the obvious question to Mr Enrile. Obviously he was using an ancient Pinoy mind trick to throw the debate off tangent.

As Cayetano asserted in his speech, resigning from the Senate Presidency and getting reinstated by a “vote of confidence” from one’s colleagues will not bring us closer to the bottom of the matter of the Senate’s finances. Neither of course will Enrile’s bringing up the late Cayetano’s alleged multi-million peso “debt”. But all that’s par for the course in Philippine politics and in the Philippine National “Debate” in general where the arguments are for the most part “droll and unintelligent, focused on the trivial or the irrelevant” you need such spectacles to distract the public from the point they regularly miss — that the joke has always been on the ordinary Pinoy schmoe and that one way or the other, it is their senators and congressmen who ultimately end every story laughing all the way to the bank.

So we really shouldn’t hold our breath while waiting for Senator Enrile to get it.

He won’t.

Resignations, walkouts, “votes of confidence”, “interfaith rallies”, online petitions, “unity walks”, fun runs, etcetera, etcetera… Filipinos love their dramas, circuses and spectacles because it gives them false assurance that one or the other sits atop the higher horse in public discourse where the issues — and even the point itself — always take the back seat.

As I said before, this amusing skirt-lifting frenzy going on in the Senate between what ultimately are all a bunch of bozos anyway traces its roots to the impeachment trial of former Chief Justice Renato Corona. It was in this half-year circus that the various Senators’ dirty laundry were laid bare before the public eye; where what was once a smokescreen that cloaked the way these people’s “representatives” wheeled and dealt amongst themselves over how to slice the pie that is the Filipino taxpayer’s money was blown away.

There was accidental genius indeed in President Benigno Simeon “BS” Aquino III’s obssession with impeaching Corona to save Uncle Peping’s family jewels. It turned Philippine legislators against one another and, in the process, achieved far more than any activist movement or anti-corruption “czar” had over the last 30 years — force transparency and accountability out of Congress from within.

Cayetano’s call for a private audit of the Senate (echoing the call earlier made by his colleague Senator Miriam Santiago) takes its place amongst the growing number of Damocles swords now hanging over the Senate — the calls to re-evaluate declared Statements of Assets Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN), the call to dismantle the Philippines’ archaic bank secrecy laws, calls to public officials to open their dollar accounts to the public. The Senators are doing themselves in. We just need to sit back and watch.

The Senate may be self-destructing from within, but the Filipino will likely end up the winner for a change in the aftermath of all this; getting amusing television fodder in the process.