Vice President Sara Duterte went to the House of Representatives on Aug. 27 prepared to be cited in contempt and detained by lawmakers, many of whom used to be on her side in defending the budget for the Office of the Vice President (OVP).
She was well aware that it was a different territory she was entering. Gone were the days when she could mobilize her political allies in the chamber to remove its speaker, who was also from Davao but had bragged that he could have the former president impeached.
She knew that she could not expect the current House members to give her kid glove treatment after she called the current speaker, Martin Romualdez, a “tambaloslos,” described in the dictionary as a “mythical creature with a huge mouth that opens wide with all the facial flesh going to the back of the head, revealing a bloody face that will shock you.”
Her father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, had also referred to the House of Representatives as the “most rotten institution” in the country after it realigned P650 million in confidential funds tucked in the OVP and Department of Education budget proposals for 2024.
Departing from the usual practice of having all executive officials in tow during budget hearings, the vice president was accompanied only by her spokesman, Michael Poa. “I decided I’ll come alone, answer all of it alone. So, if you hold me in contempt, I’m the only one who will go into detention and not involve the other people here and their families who are waiting for them at home,” she told members of the House Appropriations Committee.
But the congressmen just kept throwing their questions and holding their temper, depriving her the chance to be cited in contempt and detained.
In the course of the deliberations that lasted more than five hours, the vice president accused the lawmakers of going by an “attack script” to humiliate her. In a lengthy opening statement, she also claimed to have recorded conversations about the lawmakers’ plot to impeach her.
But it was she who came prepared with a scripted answer to all questions related to the OVP budget: “I would like to forgo the opportunity to defend the budget in the question-and-answer format. I would leave it to the House to decide on the proposal as presented/submitted.”
She also had a uniform answer to questions about confidential funds, saying that the OVP has received audit actions regarding those and that it has submitted audit responses and assures full cooperation with the “ongoing and unfinished audit.”
She was combative. She was stubborn, refusing to be swayed from her prepared responses, dodging every question thrown at her.
Only three House members spoke in her defense. One of them was former president and incumbent Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who protested against her colleagues’ persistent questioning of the OVP’s spending of P125 million confidential funds in 11 days in 2022.
It was payback time for Arroyo, who was installed as speaker of the House in place of Pantaleon Alvarez, who caught the ire of Duterte, then mayor of Davao City, in 2018 and who mobilized her allies in the Hugpong ng Pagbabago regional party in mustering the number among her father’s allies to change the House leadership.
But Arroyo’s defense of the vice president only put her in an embarrassing situation as Rep. Stella Quimbo, the presiding officer, pointed out that the invitation letter sent to Duterte included an item that clearly illustrated that the confidential funds issue wasn’t a prohibited subject and that the lawmakers’ questions “fall squarely” within the topics specified.
The two others who were on the vice president’s side during the budget hearing were Davao Occidental Rep. Claude Bautista and Davao City Rep. Isidro Ungab, who should have known better about the committee rules for having been a former chair of the appropriations panel.
The vice president was more prepared when she appeared at the House than when she faced the Senate on Aug. 20. The senators were not hostile to her. In fact, only opposition Sen. Risa Hontiveros asked her discomfiting questions about the duplicity of her projects with government agencies providing assistance to the poor, and on the P10 million budget the OVP was asking for the publication of her self-authored book, “Isang Kaibigan.”
While Hontiveros kept her composure in asking questions, the vice president was visibly annoyed by her line of questioning. Although out of topic, she recalled that in 2016, Hontiveros had sought her help after losing in two prior elections. She said that despite the reluctance of her allies, she still helped her get votes in the Visayas and Mindanao. However, she said, Hontiveros began attacking her and her father after she won.
Clearly, she was insinuating that Hontiveros owes her a debt of gratitude and should not be questioning her. Actually, Hontiveros’ questions were quite basic and never hostile. She did not even object when Sen. Grace Poe declared that the proposed P2.037 billion budget for the OVP in 2025 is deemed submitted to the plenary. She only expressed reservation to propose realignments when it is taken in plenary later this year.
VP Sara’s father had the same distorted sense of gratitude when he refused to protest against China’s aggression and intrusions in the West Philippine Sea, citing the country’s “huge debt of gratitude” to a “good friend” for its donation of 1 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic.
It was also out of gratitude that he appointed his fraternity brother and a member of his campaign team, Christopher Lloyd Lao, as chief of the budget department’s procurement service when Pharmally Pharmaceutical Corp. won P8.6 billion in government contracts for face masks and COVID-19 test kits, which were later found to have been overpriced. Lao was a volunteer election lawyer in Duterte’s 2016 campaign for the presidency.
Duterte cited the same debt of gratitude for appointing Chinese businessman Michael Yang as a presidential economic adviser in 2018. Yang has been implicated in the Pharmally procurement scandal as well as in illegal drug trafficking and the operations of the Philippine offshore gaming operators (POGOs).
In a Hakbang ng Maisug rally in Davao City in January this year, Davao City Mayor Sebastian Duterte reminded the Marcoses and the public that it was his father who allowed the burial of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. at the Libingan ng mga Bayani in 2016.
Recently, the vice president reminded Marcos Jr. that he and his sister, Sen. Imee Marcos, sought her help to make him win in the 2022 presidential election.
In an article published three years ago, retired career diplomat Hermenegildo Cruz said that citing “utang na loob” is a “discredited practice in diplomacy. He said it is resorted to only when negotiators are ill-prepared and run out of arguments to justify a subservient position.
A 2017 paper by Sheldon Ives Agaton of the Eastern Visayas State University noted that while “utang na loob” is one of the values deeply practiced among Filipinos, it is also “prone to misuse and abuse.”
“There is nothing wrong with ‘utang na loob,’ but the misuse of it [more] often than not produces negative consequences. It can also be a source of serious disciplinary problems in the organization or institution,” the paper said in part.
The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of VERA Files.
This column also appeared in The Manila Times.
