Getsy Tiglao By Getsy Tiglao   Ahh, these politicians – they protest too much. Such an outcry over the audacious plan of the Department of Justice to place Janet Lim Napoles, derisively called the pork barrel queen, under the Witness Protection Program prior to her becoming state witness. “She’s not worthy” and “she’s the most guilty” are just two of the arguments we’ve heard, delivered in typical self-righteous indignation, usually by the most shallow politicians. These points of law and morality can be argued to death by politicians but the ordinary citizen just wants to hear one thing: the truth. Thus, while senators and congressmen may not like Napoles becoming a state witness, ready to spill all, I bet you a million bitcoins that Filipino voters don’t care otherwise because they just want to hear what Napoles has to say. There has been too much cover-up in this case already and it’s time to let the ax fall where it may. The people want to know first of all, who is the real brains behind the pork barrel scam? How could Napoles, who grew up in the hinterlands of Basilan and with little education, have concocted an elaborate, complicated scheme to defraud the government of at least P10 billion? Who is the real financial and bureaucratic genius who dreamed up this large-scale plan? It’s hard to believe that Napoles – a fraudster to be sure, but no brainiac – thought of this scheme to create fake non-governmental organizations that would submit documentation to government agencies, facilitating the release of the special allotment release order (SARO) that in turn would be sourced from the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF). Ask anyone who has worked in government and they will tell you that getting funding is a bureaucratic nightmare. Various documents are required for any requests or applications, and you have to get the signatures of too many officials. Napoles never worked in government so how did she gain the knowledge and the network required for such a labyrinthine operation as the PDAF scam? Someone taught her how and as Napoles has been insisting from four years ago (though no one wanted to listen during the former administration), it is ex-Budget secretary Florencio “Butch” Abad who was her mentor and teacher. She detailed Abad’s involvement in her 32-page affidavit submitted to the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee in May,  2014. She recounted how she met Abad, through an agent named Manuel Jarmin, at the Japanese restaurant in EDSA Shangri-la Plaza Hotel, with another meeting at the Cravings restaurant on Katipunan Avenue. Napoles claimed that Abad asked her for a loan of P4 million which he later paid off with an interest of P2 million. Perhaps because he felt indebted to her, Abad told Napoles how NGOs can be the channel for acquiring the PDAF allocations of senators and congressmen. “When we talked about the implementation of a project, he asked me if I have an NGO or cooperative. I said I had none, and he said he’d take care of this. As far as I can remember, he used the Batanes Electric Cooperative to implement the project,” Napoles said. At least one another person corroborates Abad’s involvement, former Napoles employee Merlina Suñas. In her affidavit in 2013, Suñas said that Abad was one of the congressmen that did business with Napoles from 1997 to 1999. Abad, who was former agrarian reform secretary under the Corazon Aquino administration, education secretary under Gloria Arroyo, and budget secretary under Benigno Aquino III, has tons of bureaucratic experience. He has a law degree and a master’s from Harvard. But he denies that he is Napoles’ mentor. Napoles proffered a new affidavit to Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II, which triggered her provisional entry into the WPP. According to early reports, Napoles’ affidavit will reaffirm Abad as the real mastermind of the pork barrel scam. This will then qualify her as a state witness. As explained by Secretary Aguirre: “In the event that there are two accused with almost the same level of guilt – one who committed plunder and the other the instigator – the Supreme Court said that it will be the instigator who is considered most guilty.” Napoles reportedly will also name all the politicians and their agents who have participated in this operation to siphon billions of pesos in government funds. As to the names, one can get clues from her 2014 affidavit in which she had tagged 20 senators and 100 congressmen as having benefitted from the PDAF kickbacks. Among those Napoles had tagged are the ones who are very noisy right now. “I am not the mastermind of the pork barrel because I didn’t start this; this has long been the practice or system,” Napoles said. Indeed, the pork barrel scam is a clear indication of the systemic corruption in our political system. The cleansing begins when the real mastermind and his cohorts are jailed. Otherwise, we will continue to see these kinds of grand-scale theft perpetrated by public officials and elected legislators.