High-paid gov’t officials, please step up

The article “Entire PH military donating parts of salaries for COVID-19 fight” (4/7/20) was welcome news amid the COVID-19 pandemic and dwindling government resources now spread ever so thinly across the archipelago.

Pray tell, why haven’t we heard from the other government officials receiving monthly salaries, allowances, bonuses, incentives, etc., in astronomical amounts? Take, for instance, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas officials who continue aggrandizing themselves with close to or over P1 MILLION PER MONTH in salaries, etc. (“4 top BSP execs highest paid in gov’t,” 6/10/17). And there are countless numbers of rent-seeking charlatans up there in all three branches of the government who continue to receive such obscene paychecks every month. The amount to be realized from their own “donations” could be a hundred times more than what the AFP had generously offered.

Surely, President Duterte has the cachet to influence all of them to refrain from amassing more wealth and to donate the same to all efforts to deal with the untold miseries that COVID-19 has brought upon this country. Ridiculously super-rich as they are already, they will undoubtedly survive a couple of months without being paid a single centavo for their “public service,” which is virtually nonexistent anyway. Under the current lockdown, at least the taxpayers will be getting what they are paying for: Nothing for nothing!

Public Servant Number One, whose official monthly compensation amounts to a paltry one-fourth of what those BSP satraps and their ilk are helping themselves to, can start passing the hat around with his own paycheck in it. While it’s good to hear that “most” of his Cabinet officials have pledged 75 percent of their pay to the fight against the pandemic, that’s really just a drop in the bucket. It bears stressing that this disease will most likely continue to bedevil this country through the rest of the year, as even the most advanced countries in the world are still groping in the dark in search of an antidote.

So, Mr. President, please do what you do best: Shame the shameless!

Stephen L. Monsanto
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