Former public works secretary Rogelio Singson, who resigned from the Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI) that is investigating corruption in flood control projects on Thursday, urged Congress to pass a law to strengthen the fact-finding body and give it more authority that will allow it to do its job better.
“What we wanted to convey was ICI, as it is today, does not have enough powers to be able to execute as quickly as we can what we need to do,” he said at a press conference a day after ICI head Andres Reyes Jr. announced that Singson would be stepping down later this month, citing stress and unspecified security risks.
Singson appealed to members of the House of Representatives and the Senate, who could potentially be the target of ICI investigations, to pass a measure to strengthen the probe body.
With the current state of the ICI, which has a limited budget, he said the commission could not carry the entire weight of the corruption problem as it needed solid backing from the Office of the President and Congress.
The ICI was established through an executive order by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in September, in the midst of an anti-corruption campaign against nonexistent, substandard, and incomplete flood control projects that allegedly involve billions of pesos in kickbacks to lawmakers and public works officials from private contractors.
Singson said that he had advocated focusing on the people higher up the major infrastructure corruption ladder, instead of the small fry.
Under its current mandate, the ICI is only allowed to investigate and merely recommend cases to the Ombudsman, which will review the evidence and then decide if there is enough to file a criminal case in the Sandiganbayan.
Singson lamented that when a person under investigation is able to flee the country or refuses to appear before the ICI, the body becomes the nation’s “punching bag.”
Even Malacañang remains lukewarm to calls for the President to certify as urgent any proposed measure to make the ICI more robust.
The resignation of Rogelio Singson, one of the more credible members of the ICI, along with him pleading for more authority for the body to do its job, needs to be taken seriously by the President and both Houses of Congress, especially if they serious about eradicating corruption and holding the corrupt accountable in this country.
If the ICI remains a toothless “punching bag,” and Filipinos figure out that all this anti-corruption posturing is nothing but lip service, how much more of this sort of governance are we going to stomach?*
