Millan: The Mysterious Island

Thursday, February 2, 2012

IT IS a wonder that a small island like Tawi-Tawi with just a dozen municipalities has more students than a big province like Magindanao that has almost forty municipalities.

It is a marvel that a small island like Tawi-Tawi with just a dozen municipalities has more students than a big province like Lanao del Sur that has more than forty municipalities.

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This is the discovery, the surprising discovery, of the OIC Governor of the Armm after conducting an investigation and an inventory of the Department of Education of the Armm.

In addition, after an intensive accounting and after a comprehensive auditing of the Department of Education of the Armm, it was also found out, in an equally surprising manner, that there are thousands of ghost teachers and there are hundreds of ghost schools.

Many of these ghost teachers are either dead, working elsewhere in the Armm, working elsewhere in other provinces of the country, even working abroad, or just plain and simple not people.

Many of these ghost schools were inexistent, nowhere to be found where they were supposed to be, never even located anywhere in the Armm or wherever.

It appears, now, that the main problem at the Department of Education of the Armm is neither the armed conflicts nor the natural calamities. It is, though not very surprising, graft and corruption.

It is made to appear that there are so much more students who are enrolled, teachers who are employed, and schools that have been built, in order to receive a budget larger than what is supposed to be allocated.

Too bad, more than a billion pesos were supposed to be released already for the construction of school buildings in the Armm, but such infrastructure project had to be suspended until such time that the DPWH and the COA have driven out all the ghosts.

The DPWH and the COA, however, are two institutions that do not necessarily inspire trust or promote confidence. They, too, have their own share of ghost stories. But, in this case, we can only hope and pray that they will not be bound by honor among thieves, but by the straight path, whatever that means.

In any case, this is a very good start for the recently appointed OIC Governor of the Armm. But of course, more important than the beginning, is the end. And this end, wherever that may be, remains to be seen, and heard, and felt. The best if he can make not just a land of promise but a land of fulfillment, and not ghost towns in the mysterious island.