HEADLINE: P700 billion lost annually to corruption.
Headline: New P4.5 billion Senate Building breaks ground.
Headline: Speaker of the House, Alan Peter Cayetano, asks for an additional budget of 4 billion pesos for individual congressmen.”
Behind the headline: According to statistics there are 4.5 million homeless people in the Philippines. At five to a family that roughly translates into 900, 000 homeless families. At 200 thousand pesos per house, housing the homeless in the country will cost us 180 billion plus a little more for overhead. This amount is well inside the 700 billion we lose annually to corruption.
Behind the headline: Statistics show that in 2015, 92 percent of total population had access to at least basic water. It looks like a good percentage until you compute for the 8 percent or 8.48 million people who have no access to water. That’s a lot of waterless people. It’s double the homeless who are most probably also part of the waterless lot. That is a scandalously staggering number of people in the country who have no access to water for basic health and sanitation needs. And we are not even talking yet of waterless farms, waterless livestock, etc.
It is also a fact in this country that the poorer you are the less access you have to water and the more you have to pay for the little water you have access to. Poor communities in the country depend on water sold by privately owned water sources like deep wells. Government officials are doing something else with people’s money.
The math for these two sets of facts is easy. The 700 billion alone that we lose to corruption annually is more than enough to provide the millions of homeless and waterless Filipinos with houses and water. Yet our Senators and congressmen, who, I am sure, have their share of the P700 billion lost to corruption, still have the gall to build a new luxury building worth P4.5 billion and to budget an additional P4 billion mainly to fund 22 deputy speakers.
How can Senators, dressed in exquisitely tailored suits, drive super-expensive SUV’s to a P4.5 billion office building when 4.5 million Filipinos are homeless and 8.48 million are waterless? How can Speaker Cayetano ask for P4 billion to appease congressmen and accommodate 22 deputies so his Speakership would not be contested? This is utter callousness on the part of officials who were voted into office to provide basic social services to the people.
There is only one thing worse than callous officials and that’s a callous people. How can we let clowns in the Senate and the House spend our money for their comfort and convenience and not for people’s basic needs like house and water? How can we not be angry at how they make us into idiots?