📷: Alliance of Health Workers | FB
By Diego Morra
The way the Palace and his Lower House allies framed it, utang na loob pa ng bayan na lumisan sa puwesto si Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez. The rumor being peddled around is that Romualdez wanted to “save” the House of Representatives not only from avoidable allegations that its leading members are corrupt to the bone and shoveled money into their vaults at home.
Waxing emotional, the Romualdez said he was quitting “with full heart, clear conscience,” indicating that he is innocent of all the nasty talk about being the owner of eight mansions in Forbes Park and for having sent his two sons to study at the most expensive Le Rosey boarding school in Rolle, Switzerland and its winter campus ion Gstaad. There is an added attraction in Le Rosey, the resident ghost called “dame blanche.” You get to meet her by paying P6-million in annual tuition, P12-million for two kids, with no discount. Nothing was invoked to show that he was not responsible for the fiscal impunity and the criminal enterprise that violated the ban on pork barrel, whether it comes from congressional insertions or from overpriced flood control projects.
Plain denial in any language has no probative value, whether it was during the time of Gilgamesh, the Jewish judges, the Sumerian and Babylonian kings. It simply cannot absolve Romualdez of his role in bloating the national budget of 2025 and the appropriation laws of the previous years. As speaker of the Lower House, he has to apportion resources to his most loyal allies, and appointing Ako Bikol Rep. Elizaldy Co is not exactly the best way to ensure Bicolanos and 115 million suffering Filipinos that the taxes that they pay in addition to expensive fees for government services are used efficiently. The fact that his Sunwest Construction and other related companies took a huge slice of the P100-billion lost in dubious flood control projects (FCPs) should tell the entire country that Co and other lawmakers actually consider their job as a profitable business.
Romualdez cannot wriggle himself away from the trap named Rizaldy Co despite easing him out as chief of the appropriations panel, especially now that Agriculture Secretary Francis Tiu Laurel Jr. finally revealed that Co wanted his fishing company to get an allocation of 3,000 containers of imported fish. Laurel was rhe wrong man to ask since he was actually the admiral of the Frabelle fishing fleet before he took the agriculture portfolio. He simply rejected the plea. Was there even a need to flood the country with fish? There was none. So, Laurel took a position he was expected to take and now that he has spoken, he must as well reveal the whole hog. Reminds us of the story of a customs chief who stopped a notorious smuggler from bringing in shiploads of goods. Just a simple pistol shoved into the guy’s face did the trick.
In the case of Romualdez, he cannot feign innocence about what his underlings are doing. This is akin to the “palusot” of Sen. Mark Villar that he cannot be blamed for the abuses of Primewater, which has joint ventures with 440 local water districts (LWDs), since he delegated the approval process to his underlings. Neither can he be blamed for the more than 10,000 incomplete, substandard and ghost FCPs that sullied his incumbency as secretary of public works and highways from 2016 to 2022. He needs a basin as big as that of Pontius Pilate for him to wash his hands clean, daily and gaily. Or the excuse of Davao City Rep. Apollo “Pulong” Duterte that he never received the P51-billion allocated or his eternally flooded city in the last three years of the unlamented Rodrigo Duterte administration. The sister, Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio, also joined the fun with P12.2-billion in disallowed expenditures when she headed the Department of Miseducation.
Ironically, it was former Supreme Court (SC) Associate Justice Lucas Bersamin who was the ponente of the High Court decision that made the pork barrel, an institution inherited from corrupt Americans in 1920, illegal. The decision on the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) is the law on pork barrel but apparently the geniuses in government have many ways of skirting the law, or skinning the cat, as it were. There is no reason for lawmakers to heave a sigh of relief after Romualdez quit. It is not even assured that the Lower House officials he appointed would follow his lead, from the secretary general down to the members of “task forces” that quaff expensive cognac to go with the steak and caviar.
At best, newly-chosen Speaker Isabela Rep. Faustino “Bojie” Dy III will be manning the store. He was tapped by Romualdez to keep the House in order, with 253 votes and 28 abstentions solidifying his role. Romualdez knew that sticking to the speakership would not only damage him but also Malacanang, with Bongbong’s gray hair multiplying when the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA) crawled with FCPs along with the proposed 2026 GAB. Worse, Bongbong’s anti-corruption drive was unleashed to kick pesky lawmakers from putting their dirty fingers into the DPWH budget. “The longer I stay, the heavier that burden grows—on me, on this House, and on the president I have always sought to support. And so, after deep reflection and prayer, I have made a decision. Today, with a full heart and a clear conscience, I tender my resignation as speaker of the House of Representatives,” Romualdez roared.
Hope springs eternal but when your signature is all over the congressional insertions, when you failed to mitigate the plunder of the wolves of the bicameral conference committee (BCC) and, just once, ordered the miscreants to stop for the nonce, Romualdez showed he is unfit to discipline his cantankerous, profit-taking army. The hope for redemption will be thrown overboard. If the Independent Commission on Infrastructure (ICI) will be true to its mission, scores of contractors, DPWH engineers, congressmen and senators will face the griller and, hopefully, charged, prosecuted and convicted. By following the evidence, all those who got the soot from FCPs and other deals must face the music, or enjoy the dirge, or possibly sing the ditty popularized by The Turtles: “So Happy Together.”
