The price is right
“Here comes the rain again,” to quote The Eurythmics. Falling on my head like a memory, the memory—still very fresh—is of staggering amounts of money stolen by contractors and congressmen, even senators, in the form of kickbacks, suitcases full of kickbacks, for flood control projects that never once saw the light of day.
Along with rising water levels, school closures, and lost working days, sudden downpours summon with alarming frequency the ghosts that we have so desperately and ineffectively failed to banish from our cursed existence: the ghosts of corruptions past, present, and future.
These ghosts live not just in luxury penthouse apartments and sprawling mansions in gated villages, basement garages lined with top-of-the-line European cars, or row upon row of Birkin bags. They cling to every substandard bridge that’s collapsed, every potholed road that leads to nowhere, and every floodgate whose construction was approved and funded but never built.
And they taunt us from their social media accounts, thanks to their clueless nepo babies who fancy themselves influencers as they flaunt their ostentatious (and often tasteless) lifestyles—filched from our taxes.
Money, money, money
A recent report issued by the United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese named the companies are aiding and abetting an “economy of genocide,” fully complicit in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people of Gaza. The list includes tech giants such as Alphabet, Microsoft, and Palantir, as well as industry titans like Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, and even Hyundai, to name a few.
When asked why Israel’s genocide continues, she replied, “because it is lucrative for many.”
By the same token, one could say that an economy of corruption persists in the Philippines because it is lucrative for many. So lucrative for contractors in particular that many of them were emboldened to run for office and today sit as elected members of Congress. One could thus conclude that being an elected representative of the people and holding office is extremely lucrative for many, despite official monthly salaries not exceeding P334,059 for a senator, congressman or department secretary, while a department undersecretary earns P226,319, max.
These are decent salaries in a country where the median monthly salary is P44,979.62, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). However, they won’t necessarily cover the mortgage payments on that unit in Aurelia, much less an afternoon’s shopping spree at Chanel in Paris. Ditto a business class ticket to New York.
Yet corruption apparently pays, if the ongoing Senate investigative hearings are anything to go by. And funds these lavish lifestyles. It’s an ecosystem entrenched in hierarchy, too, it seems, where everybody has their price for looking the other way and getting things done. Or in the case of ghost projects, not done.
Ten percent for the departmental employee who issues the necessary permits, fifteen percent for the next higher-up and so on, each one taking their cut of the project, with an astonishing thirty percent (if not more) for the congressman or senator, bundled into suitcases and hand-delivered to their homes by trusted bagmen.
No Lalamove for this sort of delivery. For a project that’s worth billions, that’s easily a van-load of suitcases. Or, to use the clever little code name given to these money drops: basura. As in, “Take the trash to Congressman So-and-So” (who’s another piece of trash, by the way).
Selling your soul
The levels of meta here are just beyond. They’ve rubbished our own hard-earned contributions to the country’s coffers; they’ve rubbished the trust given to them by virtue of being elected into public office; they’ve certainly rubbished all those so-called Filipino and Christian values of honesty, hard work, and integrity. They’ve rubbished themselves. And they’ve rubbished the country’s reputation.
This is what really irks me. That deep down, they have such little regard for the country they profess to love, and zero respect for the people they are supposed to serve, that they can’t even do a proper job of building what they were contracted to do.
Take your ten percent. Yes, you—engineer, contractor, undersecretary, congressman, senator. Hell, take your twenty, even your thirty percent. I don’t really care. But build the goddamn flood control barriers to the requisite standards of quality, safety, and durability. Present something decent to show for the billions you stole apart from the fourteen houses in Forbes Park.
Have a modicum of shame, if not for your countrymen who are literally drowning in fetid flood waters every time it rains, then for the foreign direct investments you keep trying to woo to our shores. Is it any surprise that investors choose Vietnam, Thailand, or Indonesia over the Philippines when corruption is so rampant, the infrastructure so inferior, and the cost of doing business so high? In an economy of corruption, basura begets basura.
We now know the price for your willingness to compromise your own morals in pursuit of wealth, power, and, it would seem, immunity from prosecution. Apparently, it runs to billions. But what is the price for you to grow a conscience?
The great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, writing with acute eloquence over fifty years ago about his own people’s exile and occupation, penned these lines:
“I don’t know who sold our homeland
But I saw who paid the price.”
How profoundly tragic it is that we Filipinos know exactly who sold our homeland. And that we will still be paying the price for generations to come.
