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The Senate hearings have reached the Law of Diminishing Returns. It
is time to wrap up and file charges in court, come up with
legislation to forestall further dubious loans and equally dubious
projects that are disguised scams.
We do not need a broadband government project if
there are private sector suppliers. We do not need a broadband
project in lieu of basic services, transport facilities, food
security, health and education. If we can get funds or loans for
these needs under strict guidelines and meticulous implementing
methods that will deliver projects without graft and with value for
the money, let us get on with them. At this point peripheral
projects like the broadband are exercises in corruption. They do not
benefit the public and it is obvious that they have been thought up
for something else.
For the critical, necessary and worthwhile
capital-intensive projects, we need the technocrats not just to
present and review, conceptualize and implement them with their
expertise but to act like educated and upright citizens and judge
them equally in the light of moral values. Technocrats cannot and
should not detach themselves from their knowledge of good and evil
in any aspect of their work. This would mean to have the moral
judgment to take a stand whether by blowing the whistle or refusing
to approve what they know are patent scams.
This is the carpetbagger era and it has included
even those who have more than carpetbags in their credentials.
Rent-seeking is the name of the game and technocrats who should know
better and can do better, play along, to get their share, if not in
money, in the power of government posts that will enhance their
vanity and exhibit that they have come up in this world. Politicians
do not have the franchise in crookedness; technocrats and private
citizens can play the same game and ironically share the same rut.
Mababaw ang ligaya, meaning how low are the
ambitions of the ambitious, how tenuous are their inner values, how
easily misled by the glitter of gold or the aura of lucre. Or, the
lure of power and prestige. They represent us, they speak for us
here and abroad, and yet simultaneously by their initiative or
cooperation by commission or omission, they betray us when they in
effect ignore our best interests and put theirs before us.
Technocrats in government projects are not
meant to “control greed” or sanitize irregularities. They are
not meant to be robots or manipulators of feasibility studies,
implementing rules and operational methods that are skewed for
private profit against public gain. It is a given that they can call
a spade a spade by their expertise, but they do not.
It is time that our government technocrats or
private-sector experts, educated and trained resource persons in
whatever field, include some kind of moral dimension in what they
are studying, approving or implementing. There has to be some
resistance to political chicanery, graft and double-dealing.
mlatimes@gmail.com
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