Transparency and accountability are two principles that are completely lost on Vice President Sara Duterte.
Duterte already has a lot of explaining to do today when she is scheduled to face Congress anew for deliberations on her proposed budget for 2025. The deliberations hit a snag during Duterte’s first face-off with the House of Representatives last August 27, 2024, after she flatly refused to answer questions on how she spent her PhP125-million Confidential and Intelligence Funds (CIF) in 2022 which she disposed of in a record 11 days. The Commission on Audit (COA) has disallowed PhP73 million or 60% of her CIF that year, citing various shortcomings and anomalies, and has ordered Duterte’s office to return the disallowed amount to the national treasury.
But Duterte needs to come clean on more than the PhP73 million in CIF that the COA has disallowed.
Less than two weeks after her altercation with the congressmen, she has again been flagged by COA for mismanaging the Department of Education’s (DepEd) PhP5.69-billion feeding program. Duterte headed the DepEd from July 2022 until her resignation in July 2024.
According to the COA report, pupils who should have benefited from the feeding program instead received “moldy, insect-infested, rotting food items in unsanitary packaging with mislabeled manufacturing and expiry dates.” The intended beneficiaries are pupils from poor and marginalized communities who have been performing poorly in school due to hunger and malnutrition.
She may not answer questions satisfactorily again in Congress today and employ squid tactics once more to evade transparency and accountability. But she cannot forever escape the scrutiny of a people hungry for answers on how she has spent the public monies entrusted to her.