It is no secret that the highest position in the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) is currently occupied by Duterte’s long time friend, Atty. Jose Calida, who also served by his side as presidential campaign manager in the latter’s dramatic rise to power in 2016.
And what a fruitful friendship, I dare add, a successful investment and its return has it been for Calida.
In just four years of service as the Duterte administration’s Solicitor General (SolGen), Calida reached great heights by becoming the second highest paid government official in the country for 2019.
Calida owes this title to the exorbitant honorariums and allowances amounting to more than ten million pesos given to the SolGen’s office by its government agency clients in need of legal representation.
Today, Calida maintains his position as the highest paid solicitor general in the history of the Philippines.
Primarily, the OSG is “an independent and autonomous office attached to the Department of Justice” that represents the Republic, from its agencies to its officials, in legal matters. According to its official website, the OSG prides itself on its “I.D.E.A.L.” core values: integrity, dedication, excellence, accountability, and loyalty.
Has Calida performed the ideal duties of a Solicitor General in line with his Office’s “I.D.E.A.L.” core values?
THE I.D.E.A.L. LAWYER
Last 2018, Duterte came to his friend’s defense when the Senate went after Calida’s family-owned business which has been awarded with multiple suspicious billion-peso government contracts. According to Duterte, Calida had been performing well and had no reason to be subjected to Congressional oversight.
But of course, SolGen Calida’s financial success would not have been possible if he didn’t perform well — for his master, that is.
In 2016, the ever-“loyal” Solicitor General went straight and hard at work to please the Duterte administration and its political allies. And there’s no better place to start than to appease the ego and family of Duterte’s sore loser friend and tyrant’s son Bongbong Marcos, right?
In his first year as SolGen, Calida pushed to bury the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. The SolGen took it upon himself to brand the burial as “healing” for the two-decade abuses of Marcos, and disregard the uproar from Martial law victims opposing the burial of their tormentor beside the nation’s heroes.
It was also Calida’s handiwork that allowed the contested extension of Martial law in Mindanao. Spanning over two years, Karapatan Alliance Philippines Inc. reported over 800,000 cases of civil and political rights violations while Mindanao was under Martial law at the height of the Marawi siege – now used as a justification for Duterte’s draconian Terror Law
Calida even extends his office’s legal opinion for cases which are not represented by the OSG, thereby bypassing the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice. As was the case in the quo warranto petition he filed against ABS-CBN that forced the hand of the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) to close the network even before Congress can grant provisional authority.
Braving the cries of the abused with determination, Calida does it all for the sake of his misplaced loyalty and vested interests. His marksmanship in the betrayal of the Filipino people will forever be part of the attempts to write history wherein dictators and their allies are protagonists and heroes.
This is Calida’s ideal of loyalty: a subservient dog blind to its master’s atrocities and crimes against the people, allowing a family of thieves to make a trio of dictators and corrupt men in our history.
His Marcosian initiatives have also intensified to engineer social amnesia. Well-underway and already approved on its third reading, the bill that might pave the way for this year’s September 11 to be the first of many dark days of an abused nation forced to celebrate its abuser.
And Calida’s assistance in the Marcoses’ advances will not be forgotten.
It is no easy task to intentionally close one’s eyes from injustice, especially when one is an expert of the law.
True to the OSG’s core value of dedication, albeit to his Chief Executive friend and not to the actual Filipinos they both supposedly serve, Calida’s efforts has led President Duterte to brand him as his “alter ego.” Calida is often dispatched by the President to represent the administration against its critics and utilize the law to punish the “supreme law” under a dictatorship – Duterte.
GENEROUS CLIENTS, GENEROUS OSG
Calida’s swallowing of his principles keeps him a trustworthy ally of President Duterte who has publicly declared his eagerness to see and help his friends become richer.
Perhaps SolGen Calida also inculcates Duterte’s virtue of generosity and extends it to the “I.D.E.A.L.” lawyers working under the OSG. Since 2018, the OSG has been hounded by the Commission on Audit (COA) for over P7-million worth of travel expenses alone that lack proper documentation.
According to a report by Rappler, COA has already given the OSG “notices of suspension, disallowance and charge against P21 million worth of [the office’s] expenses.” Yet again, the OSG earned COA’s ire in 2019 as it remained consistent with its undocumented million-peso travels and cash advances.
READ: https://rappler.com/nation/osg-travels-2019-audit-report
COA asserts that granting cash advances with insufficient documentation is in violation of Presidential Decree 1445 or the Government Auditing Code of the Philippines which mandates full documentation before government funds can be used.
Always the sensitive man and father figure, maybe Tatay Digong is extending the grace he gave Beijing and also doesn’t want to hurt Calida’s feelings with his very own Executive Order No. 77 (EO 77) which concretizes the president’s “hatred” of the wasteful spending of public funds in the form of government officials’ lavish seminars, hotel accommodations, and travel expenses.
On the other hand how can the OSG’s clients — government agencies and officials — even afford to be so generous in spoiling the government’s chief counsel?
In the face of urgent public spending, the government seems to have run out of generosity as healthcare professionals die before they even get a taste of their meager P500 hazard pay promised by the government.
DONE D.E.A.L.
The Palace has repeatedly denied Duterte’s cronyism — a similar tendency he shares with the tyrant Marcos whom Calida helped bury in the fields reserved for heroes.
For the sake of undeserving and unqualified cronies, Malacañang has now stopped releasing appointment papers after the new Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) head admitted that he is scared of leading an agency because of his own ignorance.
Meanwhile, Calida is certainly making the most out of his decision to stay as Duterte’s appointed Solicitor General after passing up the chance of applying for Ombudsman — a position in charge of fighting graft and corruption and something he is qualified for when we talk about Duterte’s standards — last 2018.
And under the leadership of Duterte’s alter ego whose integrity seems to have been already sold off, maybe a good financial D.E.A.L. should be OSG’s new core value by which it aspires to. Calida has proven himself the most ideal role model for that.
History and Law may have been Calida’s weapons to target the critics and interests of his rabid boss Duterte, it is also history and law imposed by the people who will prevail.
A day will come that history shall be once made again and rewrite it in favor of its real makers, the masses, who is also the “supreme law” – not a tyrant named Duterte who will be remembered in history as the Chief Executive who violated the law in his first day in office by massacring his own people.
Calida may be hardworking but the people are also working hard to reap the ideal society — one where the ilks of Duterte are genuinely powerless.
#OustDuterte
Featured image courtesy of LeAnne Jazul
