That darkness within

That darkness within | Daily Tribune

What drives people to make laws? What does it take, and what needs to happen before a law is imposed? Who pays attention to these laws once they are in effect?

Should we be happy over the recent signing of Republic Act 12312, the Anti-POGO Act of 2025?

The POGO ban hurdled the legislative process quite quickly after it became glaringly obvious that Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators were really hotbeds of criminality.

We cannot say the same thing about many other undeniable realities in our country, where laws are made and laws are broken, even by those who passed them.

Lawmakers are not all-seeing and all-knowing, we must agree. And in the local context, it is not unacceptable to assume that ours are incapable of rigorous thinking. Those who have this level of intellect, to be frank, somehow end up being rumored to be the masterminds.

The POGO law puts “peace and order, the protection of life, liberty, and property, and the promotion of the general welfare” at the forefront of government priorities. From a law taxing these offshore gaming licensees and their service providers operating in the Philippines, the new law now prohibits any and all offshore and internet gaming.

What led to this ban of an undeniably lucrative industry? Human trafficking incidents and torture, as President Bongbong Marcos said in his last State of the Nation Address, and kidnapping cases. It came to such a point that those who were arguing that POGOS were revenue-generating could no longer shield their eyes from the horrendous abuses being linked to them.

In the beginning, revenues and jobs creation made POGOs not unwelcome, although misgivings would always be attached to the world of gaming. And Pagcor reported that in 2019, there were over 300 licensed POGOs in the country, “generating more than P7 billion in license fees” alone, a report went.

The influx of undocumented Chinese nationals into the country, however, soon made the dangers of POGOs apparent, more obvious than the seeming inadequacy of our authorities to stem any lawbreaking.

In the end, what do we learn from the POGO fiasco, one that had such positive ambitions like revenue and jobs generation?

One is that illicit activities will always find a way, whether in obviously vulnerable industries such as gaming operations or in tax collection, to less obvious ones like government projects.

But who are we kidding, really? There’s a dark side to everything. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as they say. If we, ordinary folks, see something fundamentally wrong and do nothing about it, we can expect the same rigmarole of lawmaking and lawbreaking from our lifetime to the next.