What’s up with Briones?

Cong Corrales .

“Tempus fugit.” – Leonor Magtolis-Briones

FIRST, I must say outright that Leonor Magtolis-Briones took my breath away the very first time I met her, personally. I was star-struck, honestly. Sadly, that’s just yet another anecdote I would tell my drunk friends here in Cagayan de Oro.

If you knew her the way I did, you would be as perplexed as I am with her recent string of non-starters and unfeeling tirades against her very own public teachers, to say the least.

I first met her while the “anti-pork barrel” campaign was riding high in 2013. I was with the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism at that time.

Then, while the pork barrel of legislators appeared to have gotten the most flak from the public, it was the President’s own pork barrel that should get more attention – and the ax as well, the former national treasurer Leonor Magotolis-Briones once told me. She was also the lead convenor of the Social Watch Philippines, a global network that monitors the implementation of government commitments to social development — or whatever she stood for then.

She once told me that in comparison to a President’s lump sum funds, the Priority Development Assistance Funds (PDAF), otherwise known as the pork barrel, are actually small. In fact, Briones said, the PDAF of legislators is just a “biik,” or piglet, compared to the President’s “inahin,” or sow.

I learned from her that presidential pork is not even reflected in the General Appropriations Act. A big chunk of the President’s largess comes from revenues from government-owned and -controlled corporations.

“Ang problema ay hindi tayo nakikialam kung saan na ang budget,” Briones once told me in an exclusive interview inside an office in UP Diliman Campus, six years ago.

She also pointed out that a President’s lump sum funds are only audited after three years unlike the spending of line agencies which are audited every year. In this case, any abuse by a President on the use of the lump sum funds would be discovered too late by the Commission on Audit, Briones said.

She was, to me, a crusading prosecutor of the people and a breath of fresh air amid the fog of derision of the Aquino administration.

However, when she took the helm of the Department of Education under the Duterte administration, she turned into something but a crusading prosecutor of the people.

In 2017, she issued Department Order No. 40, Series of 2017 — the “Guidelines for the Conduct of Random Drug Testing in Public and Private Secondary Schools.”

As Phelim Kine of the New York-based Human Rights Watch’s comment on the departmental order: “Imposing mandatory drug testing of students when Philippine police are committing rampant summary killings of alleged drug users puts countless children in danger for failing a drug test. Education officials should be protecting students, not putting them in harm’s way through mandatory drug tests.”

Last month, Briones called the public school teachers expose of a widespread practice of teachers using their classroom toilets as their makeshift offices as “drama.”

The height of her numbness, to me, was when she said that “teaching is not all about money.” Of course, when you’re the second highest paid cabinet member, receiving a whopping P3.93 million a year, you won’t need to concern yourself with money.

“But perhaps what has to be scrutinized first is the mystery of worsening poverty amid supposed economic growth. After all, eradicating poverty is Goal No. 1, with its more specific targets being to reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day, as well as those suffering from hunger. The level of success in achieving this goal has a profound impact on the rest of the Millennium Development Goals,” Briones once wrote for PCIJ then.

Where is that Briones now? The public school teachers sure need that Briones now. Pfft.