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Tuesday, December 16, 2003
Malilong: The cost of elections
By Frank Malilong, Jr.
The Other Side
A friend said he didn’t realize how many children there are caroling in the streets until he discovered that the P100 in one-peso coins that he kept in his car had been depleted after only two weeks of giving one coin per caroler.
“Wow,” I didn’t realize that four lines of ‘Silent Night’ are that expensive,” he exclaimed in jest. My friend can joke about the money he loses to caroling. The amount is small compared to what businessmen will have to cough up this election season. “We`ve been giving campaign contributions since the 50s,” a Chinese businessman told me last week. “Nothing has changed.”
The businessman said it was simpler in the old days since there were only two parties, the administration and the opposition. “We gave to everyone because we could not afford to take sides,” he said. “These days we still want to give to everyone but there are so many of them.”
Some of the candidates are grateful, he said, mentioning the late president Ferdinand Marcos in particular. He said Marcos invited him and other Cebuano campaign contributors to Malacañang after he won his first term as president. “He asked us what we wanted in return. We told him we just wanted to be left alone.”
Other candidates are not as considerate, he said. Some of them even return the money they give, finding the sum too small. Thus, the businessmen have to come up with more even if it is already hurting their pockets. “We can’t charge the campaign contributions as business expense. We have to use our personal resources.”
A lot of personal resources will have to bear the brunt next year, it being a national election. The interesting part is that not all the money being solicited for the election will be used for that purpose.
Some people will be running for the “fund of it” and they are the ones who will be laughing their way to the bank in May, next year or thereabouts.
They’re not too many, however, and it is very easy to spot them from the serious candidates: those who aim to win and are willing to spend even their own fortunes to achieve it.
An election costs money. It is estimated that in order to mount a serious congressional campaign, one needs at least P15 million.
No wonder newly-paved roads crack within months after they are turned over by, and the money paid to, the contractor. It has something to do with recovering an investment with not so little return to boot.
The candidates also get help from their political parties, which is why it is important to be allied with the administration. The party in power has unlimited resources and an equally unlimited capacity to stake up contribution sources to cough up more.
If local candidates are stepping on each other’s bodies for the right to be proclaimed the administration candidate, it is not necessarily because they believe in the administration party’s platform but because they know where their bread is buttered.
They’re a practical, even if not a principled, breed, these candidates. They are the ones who are most likely to win, too. When they do while their presidential candidate doesn’t, it still is no problem. There is no law that says you cannot support the new president in the name of national unity.
Everybody wants it known that he or she is GMA’s man in Cebu. Wait till Fernando Poe Jr. is sworn on July 1, next year.
(e-mail: fmmjr@skyinet.net)
(December 16, 2003 issue)
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