Why are we free to choose our leaders today?
Because 31 years ago, Benigno Aquino the father had the courage to walk into a bullet he knew was waiting for him at his homecoming from exile.
Why did he have to do that?
Because we were too damn scared to free ourselves. Ferdinand Marcos had taken away our ballots and was ruling us with bullets. We were scared of his bullets, naturally, but we were more scared of the only way we could restore the ballot—and that was to fight Marcos bullet for bullet.
It’s true, and we proved it at Edsa where we faced down Marcos’ tanks with flowers and rosary beads: Killing is scarier than being killed, except to a psychopath.
But why are we not free from want today, from fear for our children’s future, and from the incredible incompetence of government?
Because Benigno Aquino the son has not had the courage to walk into the political bullet everyone knows will be waiting for him in Congress if he does what he promised over four years ago. His promise was to put an end to corruption in government; the act of courage would have been to extirpate the pork barrel from the national budget.
Why does he have to do that?
Because pork barrel is the fount of corruption in government; worse, it is the wellspring of its incompetence.
Apart from paying for the obscene lifestyle of public servants (such as an “imeldific” senator owning a condo in Park Avenue, New York), pork barrel has paid for the election—to high positions in the national and local governments—of spouses, children and siblings whose wits are dim (such as a congresswoman, now senator, who blocked the closure of incompetent nursing schools because “nurses don’t really need to finish BSN [Bachelor of Science in Nursing]”).
Pork barrel has also paid for the incompetence of presidents.
The president’s job is mainly to deploy government’s resources to promote the people’s social as well as economic welfare. Those resources are mainly public funds, that’s why how the president proposes to spend them—and actually spends them—has to be scrutinized.
And that’s mainly the job of Congress: To scrutinize the president’s budget before and after he spends it; the former by its power of the purse, the latter by its power of oversight. But why will senators and representatives scrutinize a budget that includes their pork?
That’s what happened with the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP). At least P15 billion in DAP funds went to projects and programs of senators and representatives that were not in the 2011, 2012 and 2013 budgets they had passed. And none of them said anything! (In e-mails and text messages, my friends have taken to calling the 15th Congress “Kongresong Walang Imik.”)
After Sen. Jinggoy Estrada exposed it, and not for noble reasons, the few who said anything about the DAP denied knowing where President Aquino got the money he gave to their pet projects. This from those whose job is to scrutinize the president’s spending!
“But where’s the incompetence in the DAP?” you may ask. “Didn’t the DAP in fact ‘push gross domestic product growth,’ as Mr. Aquino’s economic team has claimed?” Well, the DAP itself is proof of his incompetence. A president who needs to bypass the budget process in order to boost the economy is unfit for the job. (There’s no better proof of that than Marcos, who monumentally bypassed the budget process and buried us in monumental debt.)
As for the claim that the DAP has stimulated the economy, economics professor and former budget secretary Benjamin Diokno has written extensively why that claim is false. (You’ll find his articles in the archives of a business newspaper, and you’ll find that on the Internet.)
I am not an economist, so my own take on the incompetence of presidents (not just Mr. Aquino’s, to be fair) is commonsensical: I google “Manila slums” and find countless images of Filipino families living in shanties, on garbage dumps, underneath bridges, on the streets. Then I ask myself, “What life in the provinces have they escaped from to live like this in Metro Manila? How much more grinding was their poverty there? How much more miserable was their condition?”
No, it’s not the “squatter” problem in Metro Manila that those images represent; it’s the economic problem in every nook and cranny of our country. And all Mr. Aquino can do is pay them to relocate to where they might be safe from flood, and give some of them a monthly “pantawid”?
Even more pathetic is Senate President Franklin Drilon’s boast that in the 2015 budget, nearly P1 trillion will be allocated to social services. The bigger picture is: The Philippine government has been spending more on social services than on economic services for many years (by 12 percent more in 2015). We’ve been stuck too long in alleviating poverty rather than in fixing the economy to eradicate it; and the Senate President now thinks it’s something to be proud of.
“But hasn’t the Supreme Court struck down the pork barrel?” again, you may ask. Yes, but only in its PDAF (Priority Development Assistance Fund) form. Who knows in what other form it will be resurrected in 2015. All we know right now is this:
Mr. Aquino is asking Congress to leave to his discretion the spending of one-fifth of his 2015 budget.
That’s a whopping P500 billion, man! That’s an awful lot of discretion to give a president whom Sen. Serge Osmeña, his own Liberal Party-mate, has called an “awful manager.” Even if we can still trust Mr. Aquino to be honest, how can we trust his spending of such a mind-boggling sum to be wise?
And how can we make Congress do its job once and for all—not just of keeping presidents honest but also their governance competent?
Well, Ninoy Aquino gave us back the way, the only way in any democracy, and that’s the freedom to choose our leaders.
In 2016, let’s not misuse that freedom anymore.
Romeo D. Bohol is a retired advertising copywriter.