By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
When the impeachment case against the vice-president was dismissed, our noisy politicians just became silent. That was like saying
“we surrender due to our stupidity” At the very least, that was very revealing of the spineless or lackadaisical leadership we have in this country.
Sure, there can be mistakes along the way but to surrender in the first round after being knocked out would be unforgivable. For there is a lot of other cases that could have been filed against the vice-president for her failure to account for the hundreds of millions of confidential funds. Such cases should have been filed simultaneously with the impeachment complaint. For instance, malversation, graft and corruption, and plunder.
After so many months, so many people could not stomach anymore the lack of leadership in this respect so they filed such cases. The complainants are civil society groups, priests, and other well-meaning individuals. It raises the question, “How long can the leadership of this country survive with such incompetence?”
And why did the government fail to file such cases? It has thousands of lawyers who could have readily filed them.
With that kind of money unaccounted for, millions of citizens who are hungry could have been fed. A lot of our non-reader high-schoolers could have been offered rewards for them to learn how to read simple texts. A lot of livelihood projects could have been put up to make a small dent in solving our problem of countless jobless citizens.
Most of all, the filing of a case against a big fish would be a good example of an effort to put an end to our problem since time immemorial that we can only go after small fries when it came to stealing public funds. Thus, the lesson put forward and reinforced over the years is to steal big if you must for only petty thieves are being sent behind bars.
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