Leonor Briones: When Even the Guardians Are Accused
This Morning Coffee Thoughts entry takes a hard look at the graft charges filed against former Education Secretary Leonor Briones—a woman long known for her anti-corruption advocacy. It’s not a defense, but a call to pause, question, and reflect on how we respond when someone with a spotless public record is suddenly accused. In a country desensitized to scandal, this blog asks why we stopped asking the hard questions.
This should’ve been big news.
A woman with six decades of anti-corruption advocacy. A former Secretary of Education. A respected economist, activist, and academic. The kind of public servant people actually looked up to.
Charged with graft. Accused of falsifying public documents. Tied to a billion-peso laptop scandal.
But instead of shock, there was… nothing.
No national conversation. No outcry. Barely a headline cycle. Just another name, another case, another day in the Philippines.
Maybe it says more about us than about her.
Her name is Leonor Magtolis Briones. You probably know her as “Ma’am Liling.” For years, she was the voice of government accountability. When people were angry about pork barrel corruption, she was already marching, speaking, testifying. She called out misuse of public funds when it was dangerous to do so.
She wasn’t a celebrity in politics. But in academic and civil society circles, she carried weight. She taught at UP. Served as Secretary to the Commission on Audit. She helped shape policy as National Treasurer under Estrada. She founded Social Watch Philippines and led the Freedom from Debt Coalition. She spoke truth to power, even when it meant standing alone.
She helped create the Alternative Budget Initiative — a rare example of a watchdog group that actually managed to move national funds toward basic education. She chaired the People’s Public Finance Institute. She wrote about debt, corruption, and misuse like it was both her job and her duty. She showed Filipinos how to follow the paper trail.
She wasn’t just reacting. She was building.
So when someone like that ends up facing charges for corruption, you don’t just read it — you feel it.
And what stings even more is how little people seem to care.
The details of the case are public.
As Education Secretary in 2021, Briones approved a procurement request for 68,500 laptops at ₱35,036 each. Later, she requested the Department of Budget and Management to transfer the procurement process to PS-DBM — the very agency that’s now the center of multiple overpriced contract scandals.
The price per laptop ballooned to ₱58,300 — over ₱23,000 more per unit. Because of this spike, only 39,583 laptops were delivered. That’s a shortfall of nearly 29,000 laptops.
And the laptops that did arrive? Underpowered. Celeron processors. Slow boot times. Some couldn’t even handle basic video conferencing. Teachers returned them. Batteries didn’t last. They were essentially overpriced paperweights.
But the most damning detail wasn’t technical.
It was procedural.
The Memorandum of Agreement that allowed for the ₱2.4 billion transfer was dated February 16, 2021 — but records show it was actually signed and notarized on May 28. The Ombudsman says this backdating was deliberate. A falsified date to make an illegal fund transfer look legitimate.
The charges: Graft. Falsification of public documents. The state suffered undue injury of nearly a billion pesos.
Let me say this clearly: this isn’t a defense of Leonor Briones.
I don’t know her. What I know is limited to public records and her body of work. I have no stake in what the court decides.
But what I do care about is this:
Why aren’t we asking questions?
Why are we so quick to read a headline and nod like it’s settled? When someone with this kind of career is suddenly accused of the very thing she spent her life fighting, shouldn’t it at least make us pause?
Shouldn’t we at least wonder: would a person like that really risk it all — for this?
Some say it was pressure. That the pandemic, the urgency of distance learning, and her age — 80 at the time — all played a role in rushed decisions. That she delegated the wrong things to the wrong people. That she didn’t know.
The Senate Blue Ribbon Committee even suggested she may have been “duped” — not complicit, but misled. A senior leader stretched thin during a national crisis, signing off on what she believed were standard processes.
But the Ombudsman doesn’t share that view. In their resolution, they point to a “concerted action” — one that couldn’t have happened without her involvement. A direct hand in decisions that led to the overpriced purchase. A conscious backdating of the agreement. A sequence of approvals that showed intent.
And while no one has proven she personally profited, the cost is undeniable.
₱979 million lost. Thousands of teachers left without tools. A procurement process that’s now become a case study in how even good people — or people we thought were good — can be caught in bad systems.
This is the part that bothers me most.
Not just that it happened — but that hardly anyone is talking about it.
No media storm. No reflective editorials. No collective pause. We’ve grown so desensitized to corruption that even when someone like Briones is in the hot seat, we just scroll past.
As if the fall of a public figure with a spotless anti-corruption record isn’t worth more than a shrug.
We’re so used to scandal, we’ve forgotten how to be disturbed.
We’re so trained to assume guilt, we’ve stopped asking what changed. Or how.
Whether she’s guilty or not is for the court to decide.
But silence has a cost too.
When we stop asking the hard questions — not just about what happened, but why and how — we lose the thread. We lose the accountability we say we want. And we lose the capacity to distinguish between people who make mistakes… and people who betray the public trust.
Because if we don’t pause and look closely — if we don’t learn how to examine, not just react — then we’re part of the problem too.
Sources
Inquirer.net – https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/2081266/overpriced-deped-laptops-raps-set-vs-briones-lao-12-others
Social Watch Philippines – https://www.socialwatch.org/node/16162
Al Jazeera – https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2013/8/27/pork-barrel-protests-rock-the-philippines
DepEd Official Website – https://www.deped.gov.ph/2022/03/22/deped-strengthens-campaign-against-graft-and-corruption-thru-the-creation-of-anti-corruption-committees
Philstar (ACT Teachers’ statement) – https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2025/07/12/2457434/ex-deped-chief-briones-faces-graft-falsification-raps-over-laptops
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