With the looming debt crisis, transparency and accountability should be the cautionary words. The remarkable 700 BILLION-peso increase in our national government’s debt from January to April 2021 prods government to be prudent in spending, and it should restrain with its merry way of simply justifying transgressions from procurement rules with emergency powers; in the same way that oversight agencies should not be plainly persuaded with authoritarian gestures and cave-in to the whims and caprices of the executive branch.
If the mounting people’s needs and grievances amid the pandemic are not heeded and addressed given our ballooned debt, we are then not a democratic nation after all!