MANILA – Even if President Rodrigo Duterte wants to get rid of crooked public officials as quickly as possible, his spokesman Salvador Panelo said due process is making the fight against corruption a “struggle” for his administration.
“We are in fact struggling because the President’s hands are tied by the due process clause of the Constitution,” said Panelo, who added that it is difficult for Duterte to dismiss all crooked officials outright since not all of them were presidential appointees.
But Panelo still touted the administration’s fight against corruption, saying it’s not a failure despite the country dropping by 14 notches in the 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), ranking 113th out of 180 countries from 99th in 2018.
“The CPI could prod the President and his administration to fire more corrupt public officials,” Panelo said. “It will goad us to sack more corrupt officials. Sack, S-A-C-K. Provided of course there is evidence to show that they are.”
But he noted that gathering documentary and testimonial evidence to fire these corrupt public officials made the process a tedious one as many witnesses were afraid to testify.
“You need to file charges against them, and you need evidence to back your complaint,” he added. “I don’t think so that it is a failure because precisely we’ve been fighting corruption.”
“And as we have seen, the President has been firing top government officials and complains against erring – government officials have been charged in the Ombudsman and in the courts,” the Palace spokesman added.
According to the 2019 CPI, the Philippines tied with five other countries namely El Salvador, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Eswatini, and Zambia. Asia Pacific, where the Philippines is a part of, has a regional average score of 45.
The CPI, a rating of global anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International, uses a scale of zero to 100, where zero is “highly corrupt” and 100 is “very clean.” It ranks countries by their perceived levels of public sector corruption. (With PNA/PN)
