In one of her boring press briefings, Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio lashed out at the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan), a slew of villains, and the ogre standing behind them, Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez, for conspiring to impeach. She was nearly in tears as she essayed the victim card, speaking as if she were a franchise holder to the vice presidency and vowed never to quit. It was wasted time.
No one will sacrifice his or her life for Sara, and the 31 million voters she bragged about are still her supporters only exist in the digitized victory in 2022. Since October 2023, Sara had been begging to be impeached, accusing the Makabayan Coalition of being the spearhead as it collected the receipts of her financial mess. That she would belittle the Makabayan lawmakers as Romualdez puppets proved how badly rubes operate. Oil and water do not mix but to her truncated logic, they do. But how can Sara not be impeached when all the anomalies she had perpetrated at the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and the Department of Education (DepEd) have been laid bare in the budget hearings of both the Senate and the House of Representatives?
The tough dame in Sara when she punched a Davao City court sheriff years ago has been transformed into a weakling spouting strange claims but could not prove the Commission on Audit (COA) findings to be untrue. She chickened out of the Lower House panel hearing over the matter of taking the oath, arguing fruitlessly that she wasn’t a witness but only a resource person. The resort to flimsy legalism collapses since all those invited to such hearings are required to tell the truth. When you reject the oath, you affirm that you cannot tell the truth. Like Donald Trump. Then, she said that since people regularly lie, she can also regularly lie. A repeat of her infamous quip that honesty is not needed in politics.
Sara is much worse. She cannot retort to questions answerable by “yes” or “no.” She cannot dish out figures about spending in both OVP and DepEd, making it incredible to believe that she is a leader who relies on complete staff work to do her job. She cannot be a “commander” because of this. Sara thinks she was elected because voters liked her, but this is no excuse to be ignorant of office procedures and of the duty of the head of office to be responsible for financial irregularities in her turf. Her lame excuse about the discrepancies in her figures and those of COA was that her office already clarified them with the audit body and to hell with the Lower House panels that waited for her royal presence only to be snubbed.
Makabayan lawmakers only wanted to be clarified about her dubious OVP spending, but Sara saw a plot to unseat her last year. Yet, the facts showed that Sara herself set the tenor for her ouster. COA disallowed more than P69 million of the P73 million from the P125 million she got from the Palace in 2022 for she was doling out “rewards” for the 132 “surveillance” operations of the OVP. They were not only cash rewards but also rewards “in other products” and rewards as “medicine.” All of these might as well be rewards to ardent supporters, payoffs to ward leaders and salaries for spooks out to weed out political enemies. Sara is being asked to justify the expense of P164 million out of the P375 million in CF that the OVP enjoyed last year. Makabayan also noted that Sara’s bad habits die hard, like the hugely questionable P2.7 billion in confidential funds (CF) she spent in Davao City. Her failure to do so constitutes betrayal of public trust, according to former Bayan Muna Rep. Neri Colmenares.
Bayan Muna president and former Rep. Teddy Casiño confirmed that people’s organizations would oblige Sara’s dare for her to be impeached. “I’ll be speaking as chairperson of Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, since that was asked, and the different people’s organizations under Bayan are now studying the possibility of filing an impeachment complaint, and the drafting of the complaint has started,” he disclosed. “Of course, Congress is on a break so most likely if ever that will be filed, that will be around November, but we understand that other groups are drafting their own complaint. So there might even be multiple complaints, and definitely, we will need all the support that we can get, and if Bayan Muna will be part of that complaint, then that is good,” he added. The millions of DepEd items rotting in warehouses, the expired food meant for public school pupils, the unused funds sequestered in regional offices, the poor performance of the school building projects and the stalled P11-billion computerization program are more than enough to warrant Sara’s impeachment.
The revelations of former DepEd Undersecretary Gloria Jumamil Mercado that Sara gave her P50,000 for nine months in 2023 ostensibly to influence her as procurement chief are damning. Sara’s trusted aide and lawyer Zuleika Lopez asked Mercado to quit after she refused to allow bidders for the DepEd computerization program to just negotiate among themselves and chop up the award. If the affidavit of the NGO to which Mercado donated “Sara’s money” and certifications from two firms that offered help to a DepEd instant communications project without shelling out P16 million which Mercado purportedly “extorted” are in, then Sara’s goose is cooked. While Sara admits lies are a penny-a-dozen, everybody prevaricates and honesty is not a virtue in politics, she still has to contend with the Canons of Professional Accountability and Responsibility (CPAR) for lawyers. Just to remind her, an affinal relative of hers was sanctioned for sexual harassment by the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) after he was found lying. So much for the old saw lawyers are fond of quoting: “Even in death, lawyers still lie.”
Sara apparently thought she could get away with her rudeness and discourtesy during the budget hearings of the two chambers of Congress and bamboozle ACT Teachers Rep. France Castro, Gabriela Rep. Arlene Brosas, Kabataan Rep. Raoul Manuel, Marikina Rep. Stella Quimbo and Batangas Rep. Gerville Luistro to shtum them. She got her arithmetic, algebra and political calculus all wrong. It is she who’s got glass jaws even as she pretends to have nerves of steel. Sooner or later, her tattooed spaghetti legs will reveal themselves. That will be the day the Duterte Bastille collapses.
