Ingenious crooks, nation‘s scourge
What gets built, if anything at all, is a structure constructed badly, cheaply and often not where the people needed it — a waste layered on theft.
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What gets built, if anything at all, is a structure constructed badly, cheaply and often not where the people needed it — a waste layered on theft.
Unless the annual budget is used to fulfill the development goals outlined in the medium-term development plan — rather than being manipulated for political ends — the curse of being the region’s economic laggard will continue to afflict the country.
In a sobering discussion on DAILY TRIBUNE’s online program Straight Talk, former Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Winnie Monsod warned that officials’ open bastardization of the national budget would prevent the country from reaching its full economic potential.
She invoked an economist’s concept — the “possibility curve” — to explain what the country is missing as growth continues to falter.
Strip away the textbook language and it means that the nation’s advantage — its people, money, and land — should have all contributed to the best trajectory of development, which is not happening. And the reason, she says, is not a mystery. It sits in the budget, in the hands of the men who write it.
Take flood control. Only 40 percent of the money allotted reaches the projects. The rest goes to the contractors, to commissions, to pockets.
She lamented that what gets built, if anything at all, is a structure constructed badly, cheaply and often not where the people needed it, a waste layered on theft.
The country pays twice: once with the money stolen and again for the growth it never got in return.
The administration is working to cap the notorious Unprogrammed Appropriations (UA), which ballooned out of proportion under the Marcos regime at roughly two percent of the national budget under the new Philippine Budgeting Code.
Monsod countered that the UA should be removed outright, not capped. Her clearest example is the Makati subway, a foreign-funded project that should be running by 2029 and now, by her estimate, will limp to completion by 2032.
“The money was there. The foreign lenders had put in their share. But the funds meant for the subway were diverted to other uses, and now the government owes commitment fees on money it never properly spent, a penalty for sitting on funds it had stolen from their intended purpose,” according to Monsod.
She said, almost admiringly, how resourceful Filipino legislators can be at finding uses for money that was never intended to be theirs.
If that same ingenuity were pointed to the public good, she said, the country would have no rival in progress in the region.
Cut the budget, and nothing improves. Using a smaller budget efficiently would do more than spending a larger one inefficiently. That is the trap policymakers keep missing when they debate austerity instead of accountability.
Monsod looked exhausted as she discussed the seemingly insurmountable problem of greed among officials. Monsod has been airing this complaint since 1980.
The specifics change — it is flood control today, it was different scandals in other decades — but the shape of the corruption does not change.
Monsod said that plainly the country is not stuck in the same rut anymore.
It is in a deeper one, because the corruption has reached what she calls world-class magnitude, and because the institutions that are supposed to stop it have not functioned and, at times, are complicit in the syndicated theft.
She pointed to officials who no longer bother to hide what they are doing because shame no longer costs them anything.
The country does not lack for resources or a plan. The National Expenditure Program, she said, is the plan — fully financed and capable of meeting the country’s development goals, provided those entrusted with it keep their fingers out of the till.
Until that happens, real progress will remain an unreachable star, traded away to fatten the crooks in government.
