OP ED EDITORIALS & CARTOONS: … This time, it’s the auditors
In September, President Duterte wanted to push government auditors down the stairs. Now he says he wants to kidnap and torture them.
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After two and a half years we have conditioned our minds not to believe, at face value, everything that comes out of the mouth of the President.
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That in itself is hardly ideal—imagine not taking the words of your leader seriously.
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We do this still because the alternative is much worse: If we believed everything he said, then we would be convinced that our President is an irreverent killer and rapist, who is as likely to disobey rules as he is to make them up as he goes along.
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Mr. Duterte’s latest rant is once again against the Commission on Audit for supposedly making life difficult for local executives.
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“Those sons of bitches in COA. That COA, every time, there is always something wrong. What’s up with this COA? What if we kidnap someone from COA, we torture them here? Sons of bitches,” he said, ironically at a local summit on peace and order in Pasay City this week.
Duterte, a long-time local executive before he shot to national popularity has said he sees audit processes as obstacles to governance.
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Reacting to the tirades, a former audit commissioner said in a Facebook post that from, the beginning, government auditors are clear about their mandate: They never intended to interfere, slow down transactions and especially create opportunities for corruption.
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“Our role is to give the chance to correct and improve how taxpayers’ money is used with accountability and how it can be open to feedback from everyone concerned,” she said in Filipino.
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The COA has flagged several transactions in the Duterte administration, among them the spending of the Presidential Communications Operations Office when the Asean summit was held here and the multi-million-peso advertisement deal between former Tourism Secretary Wanda Tulfo Teo and an entity owned by her brothers.
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The COA is a constitutional commission that is supposed to be independent of any other branch.
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While it is not perfect, while there could be some bad eggs and while it is in need of modernization both in facilities and mindset, many of its auditors are dedicated and hardworking.
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The Straits Times says
Patience needed in the Taiwan Strait
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s message to the Taiwanese on the second day of the new year did much to clarify China’s stand on the cross-strait issue. But it did little to stabilise the fraught relations between the mainland and the island that Beijing considers to be a breakaway province. Taiwan has been ruled separately since 1949 when the Kuomintang (KMT) government fled there after losing the civil war to the Chinese Communist Party. Cross-strait ties have gone through good and bad patches since then. The eight years under the KMT’s China-friendly Ma Ying-jeou from 2008 to 2016 saw stability and progress in the form of agreements that promoted exchanges. This progress was predicated on the acceptance of the 1992 Consensus, a tacit understanding that there is only one China and that either side is free to interpret what this means. The “consensus” with its ambiguity allowed both sides to set aside differences and focus on areas where ties could be improved. The detente did not last, however.
President Tsai Ing-wen of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party rejected the 1992 Consensus when she came to power in 2016, leading to a deterioration in relations as Beijing severed official ties with Taiwan. Mr Xi’s speech on Jan 2 gave a new twist to the 1992 Consensus that left little room for imagination or manoeuvrability. He rendered it as a consensus that “the two sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one China, jointly seeking to achieve cross-strait reunification”. He proposed, for reunification, the “one country, two systems” formula under which Hong Kong and Macau returned to China’s fold. Unsurprisingly, both were rejected by Ms Tsai. Even KMT stalwarts criticised the new rendition of the 1992 Consensus. As for the Taiwanese public, polls showed it rejected Mr Xi’s proposal too. While the Taiwanese are ready to engage China for economic benefits, they value their democratic freedoms too much to conceive of returning to the motherland under one country, two systems, having seen how Hong Kongers’ freedoms have been increasingly constricted under it. Mr Xi is also hardening the stance of the Taiwanese government by bypassing it and appealing directly to different sectors of Taiwanese society to join Beijing to set up a mechanism for negotiation.
TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE:
https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/st-editorial/patience-needed-in-the-taiwan-strait
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