‘Conspiracy’ theories

President Benigno Aquino III rebuked the media on Wednesday for attacking the Disbursement Acceleration Program, insinuating that a “conspiracy” was behind the attacks. He did not say with whom the media were conspiring to malign him.

Speaking at a forum hosted by the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines, the President said, “All these attacks came after plunder cases, among others, were filed in the Office of the Ombudsman against a few well-known politicians.” He did not name names, thus sowing confusion, although he was apparently referring to Senators Juan Ponce Enrile, Jinggoy Estrada and Bong Revilla, who are all from the opposition and who, along with 35 other respondents, were charged with plunder in connection with the P10-billion pork barrel scam allegedly masterminded by businesswoman Janet Lim Napoles.

It was “difficult to fathom how one could equate” the DAP with the Priority Development Assistance Fund, otherwise known as the pork barrel allocated to senators and congressmen, the President said, claiming that the economic stimulus program (the DAP) was being unjustly and oddly vilified in the media “nearly two years after the same media lauded the government for its resourcefulness.”

The President is mixing up his memories. How could the media have been ecstatic over a scheme that was kept as a state secret until Senator Estrada exposed it in a privilege speech in September as the source of additional pork barrel for senators? Estrada claimed that it was a reward or “incentive” for voting for the conviction of the impeached Chief Justice Renato Corona in 2012.

According to Budget Secretary Florencio Abad, the DAP was stealthily hatched in 2011, a year after Mr. Aquino was elected president, to “implement P72.11 billion in additional projects in order to fast-track disbursements and push economic growth in the light of the global slowdown and the onslaught of recent calamities.” He said the projects would be funded from “unused” appropriations in 2010 and 2011.

On July 18, 2012, Abad issued a little-known circular that allowed the administration to tap such funds. Budget Circular No. 541, a copy of which was obtained by the Inquirer, allows the Department of Budget and Management to withdraw “unobligated allotments of agencies with low level obligations as of June 20, 2012, both for continuing and current allotments.”

This circular marked the beginning of the administration’s onslaught on the national treasury to expand its resources of patronage for multiple purposes, including boosting economic growth and rewarding lawmakers facilitating its vindictive crusades to prosecute its political enemies. The stealth and secrecy in the creation of the DAP are not only devious and underhanded for an administration that claims transparency as the fountainhead of its governance. These have also been an important cause of the administration’s plummeting satisfaction ratings in the opinion polls of September.

The President’s criticism of the media he perceives to be in “conspiracy” with his detractors in the political opposition has no basis in fact. It betrays a conspiracy syndrome in reaction to the alarming erosion of his popularity in the surveys, reflecting the growing public unrest over his administration’s performance for the past four years—long in sanctimonious sermons on political morality, unmatched by patchy results in economic growth, job generation, and poverty alleviation. Conspiracy theories cannot make up for these deficits or explain why unrest is smoldering in the streets.

At the Focap forum where he defended the DAP, the President admitted that just like the PDAF, the DAP allowed legislators to channel funds to projects of their choice. However, he said, “the only thing one could remotely relate to the DAP are those projects undertaken through consultation with our legislators… Taking this

into account, such projects by the legislators made up a mere 9 percent of  the program. Why, then, is the DAP being made an issue?”

He continued that 9 percent meant that a total of P12.8 billion was given to legislators in additional projects from 2011 based on official budget records. The amount (which was 9 percent of the P142.23-billion savings released through the DAP) was a little less than half the P24.8 billion in pork barrel that senators and House members enjoyed during that period. In short, congressional pork barrel increased by almost 50 percent because of the DAP in 2011 and 2012. Mr. Aquino sought to justify his move to allow legislators’ participation through the DAP by quoting an “older politician” as saying, “Who will remember you come election time?”

In a nutshell, the message of all these rationalizations is that the DAP will stay, no matter the furious call in the streets for its abolition. The long and short of it is: The public is asking for the moon if it insists on the total abolition of the pork barrel system. Through the DAP, the administration has found a mechanism to help itself, in partnership with lawmakers, in looting the treasury for patronage resources to perpetuate themselves in power.

The President is on the warpath against the media. But he did not need to “remind” the media of “the true issue that has seemingly been drowned out by all the background noise.” The outrage in the streets over the pork barrel is not “background noise.” It is the rumbling of the head winds—a gathering storm.