A Ces-pool of Lamitan

Some profit from war or from a permanent state of war materially or ideologically.

For instance, post WW I several investigations in the US Congress were conducted in connection with the charge in a series of publications that certain bankers and merchants encouraged the US to get involved in the war so that they could make money or protect interests in loans and weapon sales to England and France.

Only recently, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan has rebuked the Bush administration in his best selling memoir What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception for using propaganda to mislead the American public and sell the Iraq War. That the war is otherwise “unnecessary” according to McClellan but for the “grandiose objective of reshaping the Middle East as a region of peaceful democracies” is no surprise to many. What seems new in McClellan’s tell-all is the claim that the (liberal) media has been easy on Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq “that pushed (his) presidency off course.”

As an early critic of the Iraq War, I have pointed out in a commentary that the Philippine media had a better reason to gag itself on the follies of Marcos than the US media on the failings of Bush:

During the second Gulf war, dubbed as “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” CNN repeatedly maligned the UN as a “talk shop,” echoing President George W. Bush’s own belittlement of the UN as “irrelevant” or “a mere debating society” even as Bush used Iraq’s alleged violations of UN resolutions as the fig leaf for the “coalition of the willing” to invade Iraq, thus the perception that the “embedded” media censored itself out of servility; on the other hand, during Marcos martial law, the tyrant simply coerced the Philippine media into muzzling itself or into extolling what Marcos wanted the Filipinos to believe about the Bagong Lipunan (The New Society).

But during President Estrada’s all-out war in Mindanao, University of the Philippines journalism professor Luis Teodoro scored Manila broadsheets for failing to provide the “contextual information” for the public to understand the Mindanao crisis, a problem that could have been exacerbated by news reports and comments “(fomenting) anti Muslim prejudices through hate articles.”

Remember Lamitan?

At mlq3’s blog, I have recalled the Lamitan fiasco (in connection with the July 2007 ambush in Basilan of a military convoy where reportedly 14 Marines looking for kidnapped Italian priest Giancarlo Bossi were killed, 10 of them beheaded) in the following:

Helsingin Sanomat and The Boston Globe produced a joint report showing that both the Philippine military and government have been involved in a cover-up over Lamitan incident that took place in June 2001. The tragedy, a web of collusion between the AFP, Abu Sayyaf, local warlord and blood money, claimed several innocent lives.

At that time the question raised was whether the AFP is even interested in getting rid of the Abu Sayyaf Group.

Eye-witnesses to the incident have recounted that ASG leaders managed to escape from the Lamitan siege by fleeing to safety from a high-walled hospital complex that was surrounded by AFP units.

Hours after the “Great Escape,” the AFP launched an attack on the complex, with only civilians inside.

A ransom of 25 million pesos was paid to secure the release of hostage Reghis Romero II and two others. According to a friend of Romero and a catholic priest, the money was split among the ASG, the military and some politicians.

Pedro, a commenter at mlq3’s site, was similarly blistering in his response to my above post:

There was a question that was asked back then, asking why US military and humanitarian assistance always come in the form of equipment and expertise instead of funding or cash. Of course the question was answered in a politically correct way so as not to offend, but everybody in the US side including the local audience knew what really was the answer. A little bird told me that ransom payments between Abu Sayyaf and the AFP during combat patrols become hard to pull off when armed US visitors are tagging along (out of shame I suppose). Information has been coming out about AFP military hardware and ammunition being sold to various groups.

Now, of late, the decibel of the Mindanao conflict, raging on and off since 1978, has reached new levels as peace negotiators from Manila and the 12,000-strong Moro Islamic Liberation Front have expressed fears about the possible collapse of a five-year old ceasefire. The apprehension is about the expiration by the end of August this year of the mandate of the International Monitoring Team (IMT) to oversee the ceasefire. The IMT is made up of foreign facilitators that have been monitoring the peace talks since 2003 when it was signed. The team is also supposed to administer the final peace agreement if forged.

The greater part of the IMT representations is from Malaysia. The Malaysian contingent has however announced its intention to withdraw from the multilateral team apparently because of disappointment with the slow progress of the peace process. What’s bogging down the negotiation is the lack of consensus on the definition of “ancestral domain” that will affect the control of areas in southern Philippines by the Muslim group as well as the operational conception of the Bangsamoro. The trust level among the parties has taken another low when the Manila representatives have indicated supposedly being hamstrung by certain requirements under the Philippine constitution in addressing these contentious issues.

Is the media interested this time to know and inform the public whose intransigence it is that’s making the road to final peace bumpy?

“Despite the injuries, fatalities and damages done to private citizens, property, and business, the never ending cycle of ceasefires/peace talks and resuming military action has always been the norm,” Pedro has wryly concluded in our exchange.

Bear in mind again that the Senate inquiries into the Lamitan disaster have found “strong circumstantial evidence” of collusion between the AFP and the Abu Sayyaf Group. Now, about the kidnapping of the ABS-CBN news team led by TV anchor Ces Drilon (and Mindanao State University professor and peace advocate Octavio Dinampo), there’s unsettling report in Inquirer.net that looks like Lamitan redux:

The hired driver of television reporter Ces Drilon and her crew has claimed to police that a known “military agent” and not members of the Abu Sayyaf extremist group abducted the ABS-CBN team, the Sulu police chief said . . . .

Meanwhile, Manolo Quezon’s raves on the news embargo requested by Drilon’s employer, which the government has broken, are equally chilling: “Which makes the illogical behavior of the government logical only if you assume (as I do) that there are hawks in the administration happy over any mayhem in Mindanao.”

Dosen’t this post-release recollection by Arlene de la Cruz, another journalist kidnapped in January 2002, offer precious insights?

In the next few days, they kept asking me about the ransom. The torment only subsided when they turned me over to another group around the first week of February.

The uneasy calm allowed for some conversation between me and a man named Lakandula, one of their leaders.

“When will you, reporters, stop writing stories about the fighting in Sulu? Is that all what you reporters are after?” Lakandula then wondered aloud. “You write your report and that’s it. It’s all just work for you. Is that it? Just another ‘scoop’ from Sulu?”

I remember the two of us having this exchange inside a hut, and outside we could see a group of women passing by.

“Do you see those women, their children? Every day they have to walk for several kilometers to draw water from the river. Why? Because they don’t have a source of water near their homes . . .

“Haven’t you thought of how you can help them?”

In an op-ed piece of mine that was published by Inq7.net on June 15, 2001, I believe to be in the same state of mind as Arlene’s (in recounting her conversation with Lakandula):

Peace is achievable in Mindanao if there is a collective change of attitudes of all the parties concerned. First of all, total victory by either side is impossible. If it were, the war would have been won or lost long, long time ago.

I personally perceive an institutionalized culture of bias by the Christian majority, whether in the region or in imperial Manila, against the Muslim minority. The attitude seems rooted in basic human relations.

Now that the peace process is being reinitiated, the Philippine government must come to the peace table with the full realization that it cannot win an ethnic war against the Moros. On the other hand, the Moros must recognize that it cannot win a war of secession against the Philippine government. Not in our lifetime.

‘Philippines has much to teach the world’

The relevant exchange in FilipinoVoices runs thus:

ANTHONY: I think the difficulty here is that when you scratch beneath the surface, you find that the concept of a nation as a distinct and unique collective is artificial.

After all, the rise of the Nation State came hand-in-hand with the rise of industrialisation and capitalism. It was the mechanism to create artificial bonds between disparate ethnic groups, giving them a shared sense of identity. This collectivisation happened to be most efficient way of mobilising enough people to create wealth during the industrial age.

ABE: I agree that the state is neither universal nor natural, but an ideological construct for the most part; what’s even more apparent is that the power that has personified (or fabricated) the state is the same power that is attempting to demystify, delegitimize or deconstruct it, again, as you said, in the service of wealth. Now, would it help the disempowered individual to resist the reverse process? If not, why should the individual simply go with the flow (or get equipped for the paradigm shift, if you will)?

ANTHONY: For centuries, we have learned to equate culture and identity with the Nation. Now, in a world of the multinational corporation and supranationalism, we’re forced to reassess what this means. As Chuck’s post displays, people still draw comfort in the permanence of their Nation. In reality, Nation States are struggling to remain relevant as their powers are being rapidly eroded by global corporations and supranational bodies. For example, just last month European Union laws drafted in Brussels affected how loud traditional bagpipes can be played in Scotland.

Abe asks if the disempowered individual should resist. We cannot. There are such huge forces in play that resisting will only lead to the annihilation of one’s values. What we must do, as all successful cultures have done, is adapt. In nature, the species that resists environmental change becomes extinct; cultures are no different.

However, culture and traditions cross national boundaries; they transcend the Nation State and need not die with it. Ironically for the Philippines, our disadvantages and failures as a nation has given us a head-start in this new landscape. The Filipino ‘OFW global workforce’ is a sign of things to come as more people leave their countries in search for jobs. The Philippines has much to teach the world about this new style of living.

We must also learn quickly to capitalise on this ‘first mover advantage’. While we spend our time with insular bickering about governmental failures, others are catching up. To put things in context, approximately 90k to 100k Filipinos have settled in the UK over the last three decades. During that time, we have stayed largely underground, our groups mirroring the same divisive squabbling as can be seen in the Philippines. On the other hand, in the 5 years since Poland’s accession to the European Union, around 1 million Poles have moved to the UK. They are making their presence felt and once again Filipinos risk being relegated as insignificant.


What in effect I am postulating is that both nation-state and a “world of the multinational corporation and supranationalism” are not something given, but constructed by those with the power to do so for a reason and therefore the concept (or process) could be deconstructed or reconstructed also for a reason either by the self-same power to further their interests or by those whose ends are not thereby served or in fact jeopardized in the wake of it.

On the juristic (legal) level, a parallel could be drawn between the conception of the state and that of the (private) corporation, an artificial being no less bestowed by law with certain attributes of a person than a state personified by being invested with a mind and a will of its own. So, if the legal rationale fades out or lapses (e.g., the law is abrogated), what actually break the surface are real people socially relating to each other, or working and collaborating together (and I agree with BenignO that they may not be forged as one identity by some hollow symbolisms like Manny Pacquiao; commonality of purpose may be enough).

The artificial entity, it is well to note, is not just legitimized by a statute or by some agreed upon international legal arrangement, it is also reinforced by a belief system. If we look back at history, the myth of the territorialized nation-state has supplanted another myth, the open and frontier-less kingdom of the absolute monarch. The belief system then was that the king was supposed to have unchallenged authority (sovereignty) because his power was derived directly from God. The Devine Right of Kings was however undone when the struggle for parliamentary democracy was won by once disempowered individuals.

It needs to be underscored too that while we are certain the tectonic transformation of the global village is happening, its consequences are still very problematic. For one, are the winners so far outnumbering the losers? What are the negatives in terms of plain ethics: Does supranationalism value life the same way irrespective of nationalities? Or, supranationalism notwithstanding, to what extent the interests of “our” nationals should be promoted or protected at the expense of “their” nationals? How serious is the concern at this point to reconsider the locus, indivisibility or indispensability of sovereignty, or, just like Divine Right of Kings, consign it to oblivion (forget about it)?

The question then is not that “we cannot” resist as inevitable the paradigm shift but more appropriately whether we are unwilling or not to exercise the choice to tame or undo it. For if there is emerging a so-called “network of Empire” (of powerful nation-states in combination with supranational institutions and transnational corporations) poised to rule over a new global order, there is also a “movement of peoples” that is materializing as a countervailing force. In the Philippines, we also call the latter phenomenon as People Power.

Come to think of it, if the Blacks in the United States, together with certain enlightened members of the White establishment, dared not struggle to end slavery and the slave economy but simply gave in to “adapting” to their realities, will there be a Barack Obama today?

Please don’t get me wrong, though. An older commentary below about our town in Bikol, a portion of an op-ed piece of mine published by Inquirer.net about six years ago, perhaps shows my concurrence with, rather than divergence from, Anthony’s discourse:

In a microcosmic sense, Iriga (etymologically, y raga, meaning “upland” or figuratively, “there’s opportunity”) was a land of promise to the folks of an older settlement. Apparently goaded by some appreciation of economic topography, the more adventurous settlers of the lowland saw the opportunity to trek up and form a new community. Historically, therefore, Iriga was a land of émigrés, a town built upon the pioneering spirit of its forebears, driven by the hope for greater autonomy. Little wonder then contemporary Irigueños, probably still motivated by such a sovereign zeal, are strong believers in equalitarian values exhibited in a manifold of ways that many would often take for granted.

The Iriga of my childhood welcomed anybody who would want to intermingle with the descendants of the town’s forerunners and its indigenous people. The ever present Chinese and the mestizos, some of Russian, German, Japanese, even Jewish ancestries, and the scions of the “Castilians,” not to mention, of course, the travelers and adventurers from neighboring towns. Nonetheless, the “centro” people called each other “guy” irrespective of status. The pervading communal conception was thus one of inclusiveness and mutual respect in the face of a healthy climate of competition.

In my view, the foregoing enlightenment, so to speak, allowed the fruition of multifaceted talents and abilities, and spawned a wellspring of aspirations and ambitions among the growing cosmopolitanized Irigueños, which, unfortunately, the town’s resources could not accommodate or absorb. Like their founding ancestors, the unsinkable Irigueños had to look for another y raga, or a land of superior opportunities, first in the megapolis of Manila and suburbs, and then even in more distant climes.

The irony is that North America, the favored expatriation of many, as well as Australia, was once a place of banishment where European labor, who couldn’t sell their skills in the market during the early phase of industrial revolution, had been ostracized to go, the better skilled craftsmen having been forced into the burgeoning factories principally in England. In recent years in Iriga, however, a reverse phenomenon—which is quite endemic in the Archipelago—has been taking place. More and more of the “best and the brightest” are lured to leave for the beckoning “upland” in an exodus of some kind because there are no factories, offices or hospitals in town to tap their craftsmanship and expertise with commensurate remuneration. Like other countries whose endowments are natural resources and the human constituents, the adventurism (or, perhaps, abnegation) of the latter would prove to be heroically significant in a lot ways, more particularly in keeping the struggling ship of the nation afloat. The Diaspora of Irigueños, and many other Filipinos for that matter, in different regions of the world, is therefore both a blessing and disguise.

Today, one of the challenges in our rapidly transforming global village could be how to create new meanings and purpose from such our state of affairs. Or, how to avail of the scientific and technological advances that are continuing to shrink both time and space, and turn our situation of physical dispersion to our favor.

In retrospect, Filipinos in exile during Rizal’s times, had taken advantage of the liberal ideas in Spain to hone their cosmopolitanism and proved that given the opportunity they could rise easily to be equals with their “masters.” It was also during this period when the conversation about which course to pursue to attain “emancipation”—either through reforms within the existing colonial relationship with Spain or by social upheaval of the French paradigm—was deepened and polarized. There are lingering questions today whether the Filipino Diaspora, generally speaking, is a reaction to some insurmountable obstacles to reaching rising expectations, such obstacles as anachronistic societal relationship, population growth, technological divide, blighted discipline, geographic fractiousness, prolonged experience of dependency and marginalization, or the ineptitude of self-seeking elites, to cite only those already recognized by some scholars, self-serving or otherwise.

As expatriates ourselves, we have the practical edge of critically looking at certain things that are occurring in our adopted countries from the perspective of our native culture and sub-cultures vis-à-vis our economic, political and demographic structures. Now, which ones do we choose to let go, or intend to preserve, capitalize on and impart? In an age of connectivity and information as wealth, there is an excellent window of opportunities to enrich our exchanges or share our social, cultural and other experiences with one another, and with our compatriots from a geographically distant town we still love to call home.

Man does not live by rice alone

True, man does not live by rice alone, but democracy can really get problematic when the great mass of sovereign particles cannot get past subsistence level to be free from want. So when the needy bargain with their votes or go blindly by the bidding of their political lords (because power over basic needs is power over will) the free expression of the sovereign will is violated.

This is where we're stuck today: The Philippine economy is not growing enough to create surplus not only to provide and hold economic safety nets but also pay for certain essential infrastructure, physical and social, such as a meaningful program for a high-quality universal education in order to produce a large population geared up for a modern economy and an enlightened citizenry, the essential ingredient for a working democracy.

Creating the good society that democracy aims to pull off often involves a decision to conserve long-held beliefs, values, traditions and institutions, or, otherwise, revolutionize them. Whether to undergo transformation or not, it could be driven either by fear of a change for the worse or by hope for the better. Those with something or so much to lose will most likely lean toward conservatism and those with little or nothing to lose but their blighted station will veer toward radicalism. There are however well-intentioned individuals from across the political and social spectrum who will not shun adventurism to experiment on other pathways to progress.

At this stage of nation-building however, the burden of resolving, sans violent upheaval, the economic scarcity the country is facing is upon the laps of those with effective power or those who have access to various institutional sources of power. These powerholders are essentially the society's elites, who may have experienced some sort of Pauline conversion in secular sense, the way Filipinos in diaspora have been to some extent remade attitudinally, having been uprooted into new ways of doing things.

The change agents could in fact be new breed of productive men who must feel relatively deprived, not materially but morally, because they are challenged (or humiliated) out of individual and national pride for being elites in an economic basket case. Once this self-importance or sense of country is stirred, the decision to attain modernity will come easier such as on what approach to take in employing the country's resources to attain economic growth and development or how to allocate the economic surplus if and when created, depending on what ways of thinking they are willing to keep or unsettle. Even more specifically, on whether goods and services should be produced according to the autonomous decision of the individual wealth producers and entrepreneurs or government bureaucrats and specialists drawn in into those decisions in the context of public/private sectors coordination or partnership?

The looming "rice crisis" in the Philippines that threatens to destabilize the Arroyo government anew if it spins out of control is one such instance where the critical choice should have been decisively made long time ago. Today, the continuing breakdown of imagination is a telling reminder of failure to marry proven traditional practices with science in order to transition to modernity. We need not fall for or completely write off some doomsday "conspiracy theories" about giant corporate seed breeders controlling the food chain. Still a successful strategy for sustained agricultural surpluses in the area of rice production (possibly in conjunction with the development of the extractive sector) can be understood to pick up a good portion of the bill for the transition (e.g., foreign exchange from rice exports and similar agricultural supplies would help meet the need for imported capital goods necessary for industrialization).

If the political and entrepreneurial will on the part of those with effective power and resources held sway, there ought to be no excuse, given our equivalent natural and human resources, not to be competitive with rice exporting countries like our peers Thailand and Vietnam. But as it is, we are faced today with the humiliating reality of having botched big time to achieve and maintain food security for our growing population if only, at minimum, to keep their human dignity, or beyond which, for rational and free citizens of a surplus society to be actively involved in dealing with the many human problems that impact the system.

On the other hand, when only a handful of people perpetually hold power over the necessities of the many, our democracy, any democracy, is gravely imperiled.

The Hitlerian misadventures of Ferdinand Marcos that have turned upside down what's left of our democratic experiment and whose profligacy has vastly contributed to the morass we are in today will continue to haunt many Filipinos. Interestingly, however, it was during Marcos that the highest productivity level in agriculture has been observed. Since then, we have yet to see any substantive agenda to revolutionize our agriculture in terms of productivity-enhancing investments, such as research and development and infrastructure buildup. Any such policy redirection has apparently been eclipsed by the strategic focus on labor export and ultimately blindsided by the lure of OFW remittances of enormous worth. Now, in response even to this phenomenal stimulus, what novel ways of doing things have so far been agreed upon and pursued with a view to generating internally economic surpluses?

In the face of tendentiousness in favor of the old rent-collectors and money capitalists, real estate-based entrepreneurs and shopping mall taipans, without creating an adequate manufacturing base, general economic abundance and positive liberty for individuals in the service of democracy are unlikely to come about in the immediate future. Certainly, not when the legitimacy of the present political leadership remains in question.

Is the SC clueless of the meaning of legislative oversight?

The following is in part what the Supreme Court of the Philippines has held in Neri v. Senate Committee about the meaning of “congressional oversight” as earlier expounded in Senate v. Ermita:
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At the outset, a glimpse at the landmark case of Senate v. Ermita becomes imperative. Senate draws in bold strokes the distinction between the legislative and oversight powers of the Congress, as embodied under Sections 21 and 22, respectively, of Article VI of the Constitution, to wit:

SECTION 21. The Senate or the House of Representatives or any of its respective committees may conduct inquiries in aid of legislation in accordance with its duly published rules of procedure. The rights of persons appearing in or affected by such inquiries shall be respected.

SECTION 22. The heads of department may upon their own initiative, with the consent of the President, or upon the request of either House, or as the rules of each House shall provide, appear before and be heard by such House on any matter pertaining to their departments. Written questions shall be submitted to the President of the Senate or the Speaker of the House of Representatives at least three days before their scheduled appearance. Interpellations shall not be limited to written questions, but may cover matters related thereto. When the security of the state or the public interest so requires and the President so states in writing, the appearance shall be conducted in executive session.

Senate cautions that while the above provisions are closely related and complementary to each other, they should not be considered as pertaining to the same power of Congress. Section 21 relates to the power to conduct inquiries in aid of legislation. Its aim is to elicit information that may be used for legislation. On the other hand, Section 22 pertains to the power to conduct a question hour, the objective of which is to obtain information in pursuit of Congress’ oversight function. Simply stated, while both powers allow Congress or any of its committees to conduct inquiry, their objectives are different.

This distinction gives birth to another distinction with regard to the use of compulsory process. Unlike in Section 21, Congress cannot compel the appearance of executive officials under Section 22. The Court’s pronouncement in Senate v. Ermita is clear:

When Congress merely seeks to be informed on how department heads are implementing the statutes which it has issued, its right to such information is not as imperative as that of the President to whom, as Chief Executive, such department heads must give a report of their performance as a matter of duty. In such instances, Section 22, in keeping with the separation of powers, states that Congress may only request their appearance. Nonetheless, when the inquiry in which Congress requires their appearance is ‘in aid of legislation’ under Section 21, the appearance is mandatory for the same reasons stated in Arnault.

In fine, the oversight function of Congress may be facilitated by compulsory process only to the extent that it is performed in pursuit of legislation. This is consistent with the intent discerned from the deliberations of the Constitutional Commission

Ultimately, the power of Congress to compel the appearance of executive officials under section 21 and the lack of it under Section 22 find their basis in the principle of separation of powers. While the executive branch is a co-equal branch of the legislature, it cannot frustrate the power of Congress to legislate by refusing to comply with its demands for information. (Emphasis supplied.)

The availability of the power of judicial review to resolve the issues raised in this case has also been settled in Senate v. Ermita, when it held:

As evidenced by the American experience during the so-called “McCarthy era,” however, the right of Congress to conduct inquiries in aid of legislation is, in theory, no less susceptible to abuse than executive or judicial power. It may thus be subjected to judicial review pursuant to the Court’s certiorari powers under Section 1, Article VIII of the Constitution.

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My original reaction to Senate v. Ermita was a play of words: “An oversight on oversight.” The pun was of course meant to play up the Court’s “careless error” (oversight) in understanding the scope of congressional “watchful care” (oversight) of public policy execution. Why the highest court of the land appears clueless (twice) about legislative oversight really boggles the mind considering that two incumbent members of the Court have been outstanding former members of the Congress, Justice Tinga (a three-term congressman) and Justice Nachura (a two-term congressman).

Legislative oversight is broadly acknowledged as a long-standing process inherent in the power to make laws exercised by Congress basically through its various committees. Any congressman or senator who deserves the title ought to be familiar with this very important legislative task the essential purpose of which is to ensure the government is held accountable for carrying out the letter and the spirit of the law the legislature enacts.

Oversight is in effect a monitoring function of the vast public policies emanating from Congress written in statutes that are oftentimes deliberately general. A good example is the Labor Code of the Philippines, which because of its rather broad structure still necessitates the promulgation of a more detailed Omnibus Rules Implementing the Labor Code to enforce effectively the legislative policy on labor. The idea behind what some would claim as amounting to a “re-delegation” is to explore not what the implementing agency must do but what it can do under the law to accomplish its intent. The legislature in turn keeps an eye on this implementation phase of the law through oversight.

On the other hand, Senate Bill No. 1793, introduced by Senator Mar Roxas, entitled AN ACT SUBJECTING TREATIES, INTERNATIONAL OR EXECUTIVE AGREEMENTS INVOLVING FUNDING IN THE PROCUREMENT OF INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS, GOODS, AND CONSULTING SERVICES TO BE INCLUDED IN THE SCOPE AND APPLICATION OF PHILIPPINE PROCUREMENT LAWS, AMENDING FOR THE PURPOSE REPUBLIC ACT NO. 9184, OTHERWISE KNOWN AS THE GOVERNMENT PROCUREMENT REFORM ACT, AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES, is an example of an attempt to enact a law to give Congress an oversight leverage in terms of enhancing or reinforcing the implementation of existing laws.

The most familiar aspect of oversight involves legislative inquiry or investigation in aid of legislation. The inquiry may refer to a specific legislative proposal (or in aid of making law in the strict sense of the term) or extend to any and all matters vested by the Constitution in Congress; or it may be conducted to probe government inefficiency, corruption, fraud or abuse to inform itself in the formulation of policy on those areas of public concerns. The investigation is not deemed misused regardless of whether it results in actual legislation or not. In this sense, legislative inquiries in aid of legislation as expressly provided under Section 21, Article VI of the Constitution serve as a tool of the broader implied oversight power of Congress in similar way that the contempt power of Congress works as a tool of its investigatory power.

Another essential, and probably the most efficacious, legislative oversight tool is the power of the purse. By employing this oversight mechanism, Congress can curtail or increase funding for a governmental agency, or reduce its personnel or expands its functions, as may be warranted. It is in this sense that heads of departments on their own initiative may appear before Congress for “question hour” pursuant to Section 22, Article of the Constitution on matters pertaining to their departments such as to explain the need for departmental budgetary changes.

The congressional confirmation of the presidential appointments involving heads of executive departments, ambassadors and officers of the armed forces from the rank of colonels is an oversight function of no insignificant worth but it is oversight nevertheless. So is the oversight that takes place whenever members of congress consult with their constituencies to obtain information that may form part of their committee reports or be availed of in congressional debates.

Oversight, which comes in many other forms than congressional inquiries in aid of legislation, takes up a lot of legislative time and is often observed as being improperly used for grandstanding purposes or gaining sound bytes by some ambitious politicians. It is perceived as counterproductive sometimes or perhaps most of the time. One thing is however certain: the scope and meaning of legislative oversight are not confined only to the so-called “question hour” under Section 22, Article VI of the Constitution as the Supreme Court had boldly pronounced in Senate v. Ermita and then reiterated in Neri v. Senate Committee.

How could the Supreme Court miss it twice?

The first time, it is possible the Court may have committed an “error of judgment” which is not punishable per se; the second time, it is as not as easy to justify the voluntary ignorance as other than a political decision by a partisan court, a judicial misconduct liable to rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

Transparency mandate on foreign loans trumps executive privilege

According to Justice Holmes “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience,” because the “law embodies the story of a nation’s development.”

Many salient provisions of the 1987 Constitution of the Philippines, such as those dealing in human rights, accountability, transparency as well as the curtailment of presidential powers on the one hand and the expansion of congressional authority and the protection of judicial independence on the other, are lessons learned from the national experience of licentiousness and abuse of power during Marcos misrule.

Because of the strongman’s seemingly untrammeled profligacy, for example, the Philippines has become one of the most heavily indebted countries in the world and a laggard economy in the region.

It is quite explicable then that when it comes to contracting foreign loans under the post-Marcos constitutional regime, the President and Congress are not co-equal, the return to the presidential system notwithstanding. By express constitutional provisions (Section 20, Article VII) the authorization allowed the President to incur foreign debt remains subject to the limitations as Congress by law may provide, thereby according Congress a seniority position in this power relation between the two government branches.

But plain constitutional governance also supersedes legislative control over foreign loan disclosure requirements by the very absence in the Constitution of legislative authority to limit disclosure. Pursuant to Section 21, Article XII “Information on foreign loans obtained or guaranteed by the Government shall be made available to the public” without any limitation or qualification. This rigid disclosure requirement can be better appreciated if juxtaposed with the “right of the people to information on matters of public concerns” under Section 7, Article III, which while constitutionally “recognized” is “subject to such limitations as may be provided by law.”

What is more, in the tripartite partnership among the President, the Monetary Board and Congress in the matter of contracting or guaranteeing of foreign loans created by Section 20, Article VII in relation to Section 21, Article XII, the President occupies a status even junior to the Monetary Board. Accordingly, the “President may contract or guarantee foreign loan . . . with the prior concurrence of the Monetary Board” (indicating the requirement of the Board’s concurrence before initiating loan negotiation)(emphasis mine) and “in accordance with . . . the regulation of the monetary authority.” By contrast, no such prior Senate concurrence is required when it comes to the validity of a treaty or international agreement entered into by the President.

Such control mechanism in place is again understandable from the standpoint of the same dreadful experience the nation is still smarting over. For instance, the largest single debt of the Philippines was for the financing of the Bataan nuclear power station, a white elephant constructed during the dictatorship at the cost of $2.3 billion. The station has never been in operation and the country has struggled to repay the loan for over three decades.

The strategic switch in the now “cancelled” national broadband network (NBN) project from a built-operate-transfer (BOT) arrangement (which normally does not require direct government funding) to a scheme financed by a government foreign loan has been attended by testimonies of overpricing, bribery and a $70-million “commission” for Jose Miguel Arroyo, the presidential spouse. The scandal is reminiscent of the dubious change of heart in the selection of the contactor for the Bataan nuclear power plant from General Electric (whose lower bid had already been approved by a Marcos-appointed panel before being reversed by Marcos himself) to rival Westinghouse marred by charges of some $80 million kickbacks for Marcos.

We can never afford to have a short memory of a tragedy yet so fresh because even the younger generations of Filipinos of today are still paying for the faintheartedness, apathy and canine submission of our elders.

The cogency is thus inevitable in the proposition that if in the overarching constitutional architecture of disclosure and transparency, the general rule is the right of the people to information on matters of public concerns, and an exception to the rule where applicable is the doctrinal executive privilege, an obvious exception to such an exception is the specific constitutional mandate on disclosure of information on foreign loans. Very sadly, the majority of the Court in Neri v. Senate Committee by protecting presidential secrecy has voluntarily ignored in toto the all-important constitutional distinctions with potential consequences of crisis proportion.