With President BBM’s continuing ghost-busting of flood control projects comes popular demand for heads to roll and for culprits to be brought to justice. Certainly, the President’s on-site finger-pointing could not be the firm, resolute, and decisive action to send jitters down the spine of contractors and their enablers.
At this hour of the day, the President must have already declared an “all-of-government war” on corruption, established structural changes in the grant of government contracts, and above all, shown the door to DPWH engineers in cahoots with errant contractors.
In a country where punishment for large-scale larceny is rare, what the government could have opted to do is deter its commission. And it is here where technology could be used to shift its contract-awarding systems from one susceptible to abuse to one in which human intervention and discretion are diminished, if not eradicated. Technology is the way to go in seamless governance.
Corruption will always lurk in the dark with the lure of unimaginable wealth as its reward. And with government’s spineless implementation of laws against it, perpetrators will always have a field day reaping billions in ghost projects, while the poor drown in poverty and hopelessness.
But if we cannot change people’s character even a bit, then government needs to embrace a technology-based structural change to neutralize indiscretions and maximize transparency, thus igniting watchdogs of government projects.
PBBM must seize the day while the iron is hot. Otherwise, his “mahiya naman kayo” crusades will be perceived as theatrics, thunder signifying nothing. As one critic puts it, the President’s anger simply looks like he is auditioning for a part in a Korean telenovela.
Heaven forbid! But PBBM deserves our support, deserves success as he fights the avatars of greed which have crept into the very fiber of the society he has sworn to defend.
