Macabre joke

Cong Corrales/

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good (people) do nothing.”  – Edmund Burke, Irish statesman [1729-1797].

THE quote above aside, I would like to start this week’s My Wit’s End with a macabre joke — the Department of Education. A joke because, as fellow columnist Rhona Canoy wrote last Saturday, it has been behaving far from what education should be — open to new ideas and dialogue.

I say “macabre” because its most recent actions, or the lack of it, could lead to macabre consequences on the Lumad schools in Mindanao — not that these haven’t been happening already.

Before Digong Dada’s appalling announcement to bomb Lumad schools, “DeafEd” (if I may borrow, manang Rhona’s term of endearment for it) said it could not “find” any record of permits or accreditation of any of the Lumad schools in question, in an interview on national radio. Bolstering the President’s claim that these schools have been teaching subversive ideologies to tribal communities and therefore should be bombed to smithereens. Palace people maintained that they asked Education Secretary Leonor Magtolis-Briones about the schools’ status before Digong Dada’s second State of the Nation’s Address.

Before that also, it took Briones weeks to finally speak on the subject. She hasn’t even replied to the inquiries of journo-friend Inday Espina-Varona. The DeafEd was so silent on the subject that I ranted about it on Facebook.

I posted “DepEd Sec. Briones is awfully quiet on the president’s threat to bomb Lumad schools. Wazzup?”

This came as a shock to me because I have known Briones before she took the department’s helm. I was still with the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism when she was at the forefront of advocating against the lower house’s pork barrel allocation, the national budget of the then President Benigno Simeon Aquino and his administration’s infamous Disbursement Acceleration Program.

The silence was appalling because I knew her to be a bright person of conscience. I knew that through the many fora, rallies, and speaking engagements of Briones on her advocacy for good and sound governance.

Last Sunday, I had a very interesting and illuminating interview with DepEd union’s national president Domingo Alidon. Alidon told me the department has been decentralized specifically on the matter of issuing permits and accreditation to private schools, or in this case alternative learning institutions. He agreed that it is possible that DepEd national had no records of any of the Lumad schools in question but that these could all be cleared from the level of the regional director from the region that hosts the school in question.

Now, why did Briones categorically say they don’t have records of the schools being accredited when she could have easily told Palace people to check with the regional directors of her department. Better yet, she could have asked her regional directors for the information before blabbing to the Palace.

I said illuminating conversation because Alidon gave me an insider’s view to Briones’s seeming aversion to dialogue. He told me that their union has been seeking an audience with her for weeks now but she has never responded to any of the union’s requests.

Briones has been black-walling the union, an act that constitutes as a serious infraction to the department’s collective negotiation agreement with the union.

Alidon said they wanted to know why the department employs five undersecretaries when Republic Act 9155 (Governance of Basic Education Act of 2001) and Civil Code clearly stipulate that the department could only hire four undersecretaries, at the most.

He added that the law also stipulates of all undersecretaries and assistant secretaries, at least one should have a Ceso (Career Executive Service Officer) eligibility. One of the assistant secretaries has already complied with this stipulation. However, not one of the five undersecretaries has Ceso eligibility.

Having one extra undersecretary may sound trivial to you, my dear readers, but this clearly isn’t so. Having one extra undersecretary means additional budgetary allocation. As Alidon puts it, if the department continues to employ this extra undersecretary, the taxpayers will be paying for the salaries of that undersecretary, his staff, and operational expenses which are not included in the department’s budget allocation under the General Appropriations Act. Ergo, illegal.

Lastly, Alidon told me they would meet within the week and may resort to filing formal complaints against Briones before the Office of the President and the Office of the Ombudsman.

Let’s see if Briones will be open to “dialogue” by then. Still, until then, the DeafEd will remain a macabre joke of the present administration.