Viewpoint
Piranha feeding frenzy?
By Juan Mercado
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:48:00 08/19/2008
Filed Under: Graft & Corruption, Local authorities
Associations of Barangay Councils (ABC) in 70 or so provinces should ask themselves aloud: “Did we ever have the misfortune to clone Eduardo Cuizon and Leo Mercado?”
Cesar and Leo who? Cuizon is former president of Lapu-Lapu City’s ABC. Mercado succeeded him. Their “five minutes of fame” stems from a new Commission on Audit report saying they dissipated every centavo of a P2.25-million city aid for just about everything, from a Christmas party (P1.9 million) to honoraria (P776,500) to a junket to Camiguin Island (P286,800), etc. As a result, not a single development project, in the city’s 30 “barangay,” or neighborhood district, was funded in 2006 and 2007, Cebu Daily News’ Doris Bongcac wrote.
Cuizon groused that he was “too busy” to bother with pesky items like liquidating a P265,772 balance. Anyway, “the expenses were reasonable” and legal, Mercado and Cuizon insist.
What’s “reasonable” in Lapu-Lapu? Under Mayor Arturo Radaza, the city set new standards for profligacy. It bought P14,000 street lamps for P95,000 before the ASEAN Summit. Radaza faces charges for buying 470 computers at thrice their market price. And Lapu-Lapu personalities are enmeshed in the scandal where Girl Scout funds ended up in personal accounts. “The paper trail is clear,” says an investigator.
What Lapu-Lapu officials do with panache, officials in some of the 78 other provinces and 135 cities replicate shamelessly. If the Office of the Ombudsman or government prosecutors did a tenth of their jobs, our jails couldn’t hold all convicted officials.
The fifth class town of Aloguinsan, Cebu, for example, splurged P540,000 for “a live concert and a dance breakout.” Valencia, Negros Oriental, spent P1.5 million for toilets that were never completed, the Negros Chronicle reports. Davao Oriental’s provincial board members, like municipal councilors of Sibonga and San Remigio in Cebu, allocated “financial aid” for themselves. Ifugao amortized loans.
GI roofing for a market or filling road potholes can be photographed for voters. But you can’t tack on election billboards lower infant death rates, due to vaccines bought from the 20 Per Cent Development Fund.
What is most reprehensible is that their honors billed a trust account for the poorest as “the 20 Per Cent Development Fund,” the Visayan Daily Star snapped in “A Memo to Their Honors.” So, officials “drink the tears of orphans and are deaf to the sighs of widows.”
The Local Government Code of 1991 provides that local government units (LGUs) shall appropriate in its annual budget no less than 20 centavos out of every internal revenue allotment peso, for “development projects.” The roots of this provision go back to Sweden in 1972. Delegates at the UN Environment Conference crafted an innovative “20-20 Pact.” This committed governments to earmark 20 percent of resources for the basic needs of the poorest: nutrition, health care, medicine, potable water and sanitation, education, etc.
Section 287 is the Philippine response to the “20:20 Initiative’s” humane vision. But those who manipulate this vital safety net into a mini-pork barrel mar that insight. Few LGUs draw up adequate Annual Investment Plans. Most politicians prefer doles.
Yet, $50 livelihood loans for poor women, to take one example, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank. “Micro-credit is a means… whereby large population groups find ways to break out of poverty,” the Nobel citation said.
And that’s exactly how the Center for Agriculture & Rural Development Mutually Reinforcing Institutions (CARD MRI) won the 2008 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service.
Starting with P20 in 1986, Jaime Aristotle Alip, Dolores Torres and Lorenza Bañez assisted landless women working in Laguna’s coconut plantations. Using Grameen methods, Laguna borrowers guaranteed each other’s loans. They pledged to make loan payments and savings deposits every week.
The strategy worked. The women’s loan repayment rate is above 99 percent. The project’s return on equity is 12.5 percent on assets of $18 million, a long way from the original P20 capital.
Today, the project has 629 branches throughout the Philippines. More than half a million poor women are members. And two and a half million people are insured. Many are now self-employed, raising chickens, goats or pigs; operating tricycles and street-side restaurants; or working as tailors, market vendors and mini-storekeepers.
The center’s lending program provides livelihood-skills training. The project stresses individual responsibility. And its micro-insurance program serves as a safety net against emergency expenses, so often a catastrophe for the poor.
Despite striking progress, only a few have advanced to become “mature clients,” the citation notes. These are members who built income-generating businesses with over $2,200 in working capital. Each of these can employ from 5 to 15 workers.
“Most remain poor,” the Magsaysay Award citation says. “Even so, their lives are better because of CARD MRI. Even small additions to a family’s income can have profound consequences—for better housing, for better nutrition, and, most of all, for better education. Over time, these small benefits accumulate, securing and improving the lives of members and offering better hopes to the next generation.”
This Magsaysay awardee gives a glimpse of what the 20 Per Cent Development Fund could have accomplished for 41,995 barangay, if local government leaders didn’t have sticky fingers. But will the piranhas in a feeding frenzy pay heed?
* * *
Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com
|
