GOTCHA By Jarius Bondoc, Philippine Star Manila
Government no longer is working. Services have broken down. Neglected by the irresponsible political class, Filipinos are demoralized.
Most visibly collapsed is transportation. Metro Manila’s main commuter railway is so rundown it fields only eight three-coach trains during rush hour instead of the contracted 20. Yet the transport secretary continues since 2012 to pay the maintenance contractors, his political party mates, P67 million a month for non-work. The two other light commuter rails are falling apart too. Fares have been raised, but riders have no choice but to go on jostling for rides. To complainers the press secretary had this advice: go take the bus.
Meanwhile, the Luzon railway has been stopped after a derailment the other week caused by missing track links. So inept is the manager, the secret partner of one of the metro rail contractors, that he can’t guard his turf against scrap-metal thieves.
Drivers’ licensing has become a racket for bogus optometrists, and vehicle registration for emission testers and plate-release fixers. Land transport franchising now takes longer; time delay is the easiest source of grease money. Regulators have failed to wipe out monopolies in port handling and shipping.
Airports are decrepit. At the Manila international gateway, planes line up for hours because two runways remain unpaved to augment the existing mere two. Contents of passengers’ checked luggage are stolen at unloading, and all the general manager does is blame them for carrying valuables. Cabbies mulct passengers openly because airport cops own the taxis. Long contracted is the erection of a new passenger terminal at the international airport in Cebu. Yet the transport chief merely has refurbished the old one. All other international and domestic airports stink; overseers have not seen fit to ensure working toilets and air-cons at arrival-departure lounges.
Most felt by the poor are rising food prices. Agriculture officials continue to collude with hoarders to smuggle in veggies and depress buying prices from farmers. Thus are they able to buy cheap and sell up to 32 times higher. Forsaken more than ever are rice and coconut farmers. Department racketeers have made billions in kickbacks from overpriced rice imports and cargo handling. Yet they’ve ignored the coco scale insect infestation in Southern Tagalog because there was no money to be made from it. The secretary has failed on his promise to make the country self-sufficient in rice by 2013. So dismal is his performance that even former colleagues in Congress are asking him to resign. He refuses, on grounds that only his appointer-friend, the President, can make him do so. After which, he sets him up with another one of those blind dates.
The Ombudsman long ago should have indicted the two secretaries. Documents and witnesses abound of their plundering. But they escape prosecution under the time-honored Philippine political tradition of “what are we in power for.”
Other basic services have vanished. Mindanao and Mindoro Occidental continue to suffer six- to 12-hour blackouts daily. Natural resources and local officials give away nickel, iron, and black sand mines to tax-evading, polluting Chinese nationals who use the metals to fashion weapons and spy systems against the Philippines. Nationwide agrarian reform should have been completed five years ago, but continues to idle along. Social welfare has gone the “Imeldific” way of hiding street children and beggars in beach resorts during major international conferences in Manila or Cebu. By the dozens, Filipinos still are dying of dengue epidemics, but health authorities hide it by trumpeting discoveries of more and more HIV-AIDS sufferers.
Captured by the very importers it regulates, Customs has become a haven of smugglers and influence peddlers. Internal revenue agents have the temerity to tell investigated taxpayers to legally pay just a third of what they owe the government, and hand over the balance under the table. Regulatory capture plagues as well the water and power sectors. That’s why water rates rise arbitrarily, and electricity in the Philippines is the costliest in Asia-Pacific. Meanwhile, the budget chief keeps busy thinking up new presidential pork barrels.
Peace and order have become mere buzzwords. Porch climbing, kidnapping for ransom, and street assassinations have become so rampant. Yet police higher-ups are preoccupied with gunrunning and kickbacks from the purchase of patrol jeeps and defective grenades. Jail wardens take commissions even from daily food allowances of detainees. Fire officers continue to sell inspection clearances along with homemade extinguishers.
Justice? There’s none when prosecutors sell cases to rich litigants, or convicts stay in VIP cottages from where they manufacture and sell methamphetamines. None when immigration agents let criminal aliens into the country for million-peso fees, and land registrars resist computerization in order to continue counterfeiting land titles.
National Defense? That term has come to mean the purchase of defective helicopters and night-vision goggles, overpriced armored personnel carriers and cannon shells, and fake bulletproof vests and helmets. And like in agriculture, they make excuses to avoid work from which no kickback can be made. Like, the foreign office has given diplomatic clearance to repave the airstrip of faraway Kalayaan municipality in the Spratlys, part of Palawan. Yet yellow defense officials say such act might provoke war with China.
Speaking of which, the government cannot even be imaginative enough to involve local officials and the citizenry in defending against Chinese invasions. It stopped an ex-Navy lieutenant in 2012 from leading a 2,000-boat flotilla of coastal dwellers to protest Beijing’s grabbing of their traditional fishing ground Bajo de Masinloc (Scarborough Shoal). It has not harnessed the 11 million overseas Filipino workers, or even just the 400,000 seafarers who man every merchant ship in the world, to denounce Beijing before their employers.
Malacañang has limited itself to “paper protests,” as an ex-senator says. The one time it thought of back channeling, it sent a pro-Beijing traitor senator, who promptly lambasted the foreign secretary and Philippine ambassadress. That enabled China to seal off Bajo de Masinloc from Filipinos.
To all this, Malacañang spokesmen can only lie about the moment. Like, one day they say that the Executive has no influence over the coequal Legislature, then the next bamboozling Congress to create a Bangsamoro sub-state or else start counting body bags.
