Setting up the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) was the very first step taken by the new administration of President Corazon “Cory” Aquino back in February of 1986 for good reason.

Dictator Ferdinand Marcos had just been kicked out via the popular uprising known as the People Power Revolt (or Revolution, according to some historians). It was the consensus that Marcos and his cronies had robbed the country blind during the strongman’s two decades in power. Best estimates placed at $10 billion the total amount pocketed by the Marcos family, most of which had been stashed abroad.

The first Aquino administration gave itself the task of recovering all or part of that hidden wealth. Few complained when President Aquino appointed as the first head of the PCGG the highly respected Jovito Salonga, who had been a senator during the pre-martial law era.

Salonga had a reputation for honesty that was second to none, although he had his physical limitations having been a victim of the infamous Plaza Miranda bombing.

Since that time, the commission has met with varying degrees of success, or failure depending on one’s perception. Some PCGG heads did well, some did not. After Salonga, the likes of the late Haydee Yorac performed admirably, recovering millions of dollars that the Marcos family had kept in Swiss bank accounts.

Sadly, other heads of the commission only served as little more than administrators, at best, and bean-counting bureaucrats, at worst.

Over the decades, the PCGG became a bloated bureaucracy which seemed to be taking its
own good time recovering the billions of dollars that were still in the hands of the Marcoses and the late strongman’s cronies. Worst of all, the cost of maintaining the PCGG was bigger than the sums it was bringing in.

Meanwhile, the Marcoses came back to power. The only son and namesake of the dictator is an incumbent senator, who reputedly has his eyes on the presidency. His mother is a member of the House of Representatives. His sister is governor of their home province.

As for the other half of the “conjugal dictatorship,” the family of former First Lady Imelda Romualdez Marcos is also back to where they were before Edsa 1 – politically and economically influential, especially in their home province of Leyte.
 
Winding down
This week, it was announced that the PCGG was set to wind down operations. After almost 27 years of existence, the commission now admits that it has gone as far as it can in its primary task. Part of the Marcos wealth has been returned to the country. Getting the rest will be too burdensome and too expensive an undertaking.

It is worth noting that the recommendation to shut down its operations came from incumbent PCGG head Andres Bautista. It speaks well of Bautista that he should inform the government that the time has come to put him out of work.

This is not to say that the government is giving up on the task of recovering wealth that rightfully belongs to the country. The surviving Marcoses continue to flaunt their still vast wealth, none of which could have been earned legitimately.

Oh they may sometimes play it coy and say that whatever material wealth they possess is rightfully theirs. They may even imply that Ferdinand Marcos actually found the legendary Yamashita’s treasure, which is why they have all the money they will ever need. They may wish to relate that tall tale to the marines.

With the pending exit of the PCGG, the Marcoses should not believe that they have gotten away with their patriarch’s grand larceny.

There is still a permanent government agency that exists to bring justice to the people. The Department of Justice (DoJ) will take over from the PCGG, which some say should have been the case in the first place.

Indeed, the DoJ is better equipped to try and recover the hidden wealth of the Marcos family because it is an institution that does not have a shelf life, as what the PCGG was supposed to be. The only reason that the Cory administration did not allow the Justice department that she inherited from Marcos to run after the deposed leader was because it was believed to be full of loyalists to the fallen regime.

The PCGG was a necessary creation of the first Aquino administration. It is an idea whose time has passed.

Now, with another Aquino administration in place, it is time to relegate the commission to history. Let history decide whether the PCGG was a bane or a boon to the people of the Philippines.