All Saints Day and All Soul’s Days are sure weird days.
For once in a year, or twice for that matter, cemeteries all across the Christian world teem with people whose idea of remembering their departed is nothing short of spectacular.
On these days, people pick back at the forgotten and eloquently speak good of them, laying the freshest of the most expensive flowers, lighting the biggest and the most thought provoking of candles to elaborate the truth that whoever is down there has no need of all these accoutrements.
Well, to sort out these people, we find several kinds, or unkinds of them by the tombs.
Some are media men, eloquently broadcasting the departed’s good deeds and ornately embellishing their now so good deeds, as if such make the rotten flesh as tasty for the feasting organisms under the whitewashed niches.
Some are more solemn in their tributes: taking the long and hassly trek to the otherwise packed cemeteries, bringing with them flowery intentions and burning desires for the departed to just remain down there and make life as palatable as over the times when they were still alive when life was twice as miserable.
Some others however have nothing of the sort.
Their visit to the cemeteries is to resurrect the dead, stirring the departed enough for them to squirm from their caskets, if they still can, reminded of their folly.
Just as recently too, some people managed to break the tradition and re-opened an otherwise sealed casket of a case.
And instead of seeing a dessicated issue behind the closet, the Ombudsman saw skeletons.
Buried somewhere was the issue of an grossly undervalued assets of the Provincial Government, offered for a joint-venture agreement with a private company. And it was not an ordinary grave digger and under-taker who found that.
The Ombudsman, whose noses are as accurate as bloodhounds, saw that at P150 million, a property of over a billion including its franchises, when offered at that amount is grossly reeking of stench of corruption.
Well, when it got uncovered, cemetery caretakers immediately grabbed long shovels and commenced work.
Some poured their best perfumes namedropping the USAID citing first and best LGU-PPP innovations (despite being undervalued).
When they argued that the SP authority granted is above board, they forgot to see the implications that the SP also expressly greenlighted the sale as a tragic act of collusion to rob the people.
Of course, they would say that the RTC in 2001 dismissed these cases as warrantless, and that the possibly friendly Ombudsman in the Visayas dismissed these charges in 2008.
When the case got resurrected by the Ombudsman in 2014, the denied motion for reconsideration tells us that something indeed oozed out of the sealed deal.
So now, the stench wafted into our noses. And this is something a paid hack’s poured perfume all over the shroud could not cover.
As the perfume fails to mask the escaping smell which the bloodhounds at the anti-graft body found, whether it’s All Saints or All Soul’s Day, or pre-election grind, we come to the burial sites and see.
It is a stench, escaping every election, they said.
It is. But in those past elections, the rancid odor of the rotten deal did not catch the Ombudsman’s senses until now.
And when people attest that the water and power is evidently serving better now than before, that is a non-issue.
You sell a muscle car for a patently cheap price because all you can do is run it on third gear is wrong. When the buyer can run it firing all cylinders, and it screams as its glides past our fancy, it is still purring graft.
Luckily, it does not smell funny to those who have grown accustomed to the stench. Simply ask the shovel wielder grave diggers and you’ll get see why they’ll never pinch their noses over exhumed bodies.
