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THE Supreme Court—with nine justices voting in
favor and six against—ruled that Mr. Romulo Neri validly invoked
executive privilege in the Senate hearings called to investigate the
ZTE-NBN project. In my view, the decision was balanced.
It is right for the Senate to
make inquiries about projects of the government, specially if they
are intended to deepen legislation on official development
assistance. But to eavesdrop on the President’s conversation with
her aides cannot be allowed if we are to maintain the equality of
the branches. Our democracy cannot flourish with one-half of the
legislature interfering with President’s acts that have nothing to
do with the Senate’s basic job.
One does not have to
analyze deeply to determine the direction of the probe. It is so
obvious in the way some senators propound questions and mobilize
witnesses. The bottom line is that they want to find a basis to oust
the President—using a possible slip of the tongue or a forced
testimony from the CHED chairman. The SC must have seen this
through, hence it had to intervene to stop the “abuse of
discretion.”
Taking his testimonies as a
whole, Mr. Neri has been a useful and cooperative witness of the
Senate. It was from him that we got the story of Mr. Benjamin Abalos,
how the former Comelec chief allegedly offered to bribe the CHED
chairman with P200 million. But the problem was that some senators
could not accept Mr. Neri is invoking his right to privilege in his
conversations with the President.
This decision would put an end to
this tendency to the Senate opposition to order the arrest of
witnesses. Now the SC is requiring the Senate to publish its rules
on arrest for all the people to see the basis of its legality. Some
Senate committees have the tendency to approve proposals for arrest
rather arbitrarily.
The Senate should take this
experience as a lesson in its dealings with the executive. When
critics commented that the Senate hearings were going out of bounds,
some senators said the probe was in search of truth. Of course,
nobody is against the search for truth. But that search has to have
balanced rules which the SC, fortunately, has imposed in its
decision.
Rice crisis, we never learn
President GMA has declared a
virtual state of emergency in the rice industry. She has instructed
Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap to neutralize the hoarders and the
NFA people to insure supply. But the problem is that the price of
rice is still increasing.
The real problem about rice is
that we are not self-sufficient on this staple. We are producing
other products for export. But we don’t make it a point to give
emphasis to grains. I talked to an Agriculture official who said
that we should produce so-called high-value crops and use the money
to buy rice from the Indo-China states. If that is the dominant
philosophy in the DA, then we will continue to have a rice crisis.
The DA should change its outlook:
It should give emphasis on the production of grains. If we remain a
consumer rather than a producer of grains, we will be in continued
stranglehold of the traders who make much money from buying rice.
Sometimes, we doubt the source of our rice policy—does it come
from the profit-hungry rice traders?
The problem of rice supply and
increasing prices is an old one. I remember the historian O.D.
Corpuz who told me that one of the first orders of the Malolos
Republic under President Emilio Aguinaldo was to allow the
importation of rice from Vietnam. Meaning, that as early as 1898, we
never had sufficient supply.
Ironically, Mr. Ferdinand E.
Marcos had a better foresight on food security. He made sure that we
had sufficient supply for two years when he instructed Mr. Bong
Tangco to focus on rice production. But this policy was discontinued
by President Corazon Aquino.
The agriculture department needs
new thinking, not the routinary monitoring of traders that is really
useless. By the way, you can assume that these traders are in
cahoots with corrupt officials.
jules42na@yahoo.com
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