Here’s the point: Kung walang DAP/PDAF, walang mahirap

I still can’t get over my elation with the Journalist of the Year award. Journalists do not set out for any recognition when they write. My exposés come in the natural course of any citizen’s desire for a better society. If the articles do make a mark, I can only thank God for the good outturn. Yet there’s psychic reward in the stream of congratulatory emails from readers. My thanks to you, and to the makers and givers of JOY, Metrobank Foundation and Probe Media Foundation. Hats off too, to fellow-awardees Malou Mangahas, Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism; and Jiggy Manicad, GMA Network.

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Malacañang is using every justification for its fetid Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP). One presidential spokesman crows that the Supreme Court’s hesitance to stop it “proves its validity”. Another mocks the public’s criticisms as a “diversionary ploy” from the congressional pork-barrel scandal. A third calls carping ex-senators names. The same babbles that President Noynoy Aquino’s continuing high public ratings upholds the DAP as well.

Yet no defending can remove the DAP’s stain. For, the Palace has done everything except to face the core of the issue.

And that is: the DAP is discretionary in nature. As such, it is prone to abuse and corruption. It is the Executive’s version of the congressional “pork”, the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF). Thus, both must be abolished.

The P27.5-billion annual PDAF – P200 million per senator and P70 million per congressman – is an open invitation for plunder. Lawmakers have the leeway to spend it as they please. Thus did they filch P10 billion of it in 2007-2009, through facilitator Janet Lim Napoles alone. There purportedly are more such fixers: Ruby Tuason, new congresswoman Nancy Catamco, et al, with bogus NGOs and projects. Through the years the lawmakers’ “standard” kickbacks rose, from 10 percent to the present 90 percent. The High Tribunal has upheld the congressional “pork’s” legality – lest the lawmakers cut the Judiciary’s salaries. Still, well-meaning citizens unrelentingly oppose it.

The DAP is worse – for its sheer size in the hands of only one man. It consists of all the midyear “unspent funds” of slowpoke Executive agencies, and yearend “savings” of diligent ones. In 2012 alone it totaled P216.1 billion, 12 percent of the P1.8-trillion national budget, according to former senator Panfilo Lacson. No cabinet appointee dared to question the President’s discretionary juggling around of such money; silence even meant partaking of it.

Aquino plunked part of that 2012 DAP to Congress. Supposedly he had to, since his administration was under fire for “under-spending”. Disbursing P50 million to P100 million per senator and P15 million to selected congressmen, for whatever purpose, allegedly sped up spending for grassroots projects. There’s no proof of that. DAP allotments to the lawmakers have yet to be audited.

Such audit is needed not only to comply with law, but also because of the timing of the fund releases. They came in mid-2012 right after the congressmen impeached and the senators ousted Chief Justice Renato Corona for corruption. It was a bribe, maintains Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, who earlier was implicated in the PDAF scam. Even if “diversionary” as Malacañang claims, Estrada’s peanut-butter defense of spreading the guilt around does not exculpate him. The Palace might as well cry that every intervening event – the Zamboanga siege, the exposure of Ma’am Arlene Angeles Lerma as the Napoles of the Judiciary, even the Bohol-Cebu killer earthquake – were diversionary too.

The fact remains that the DAP was kept secret from the public, due perhaps to tentativeness of objective, until exposed by Estrada. Even senators close to Aquino, like Lacson, say they were surprised with its existence. The concealment is akin to the previous Arroyo regime, which with favorite lawmakers and governors plundered the P165-billion Malampaya Fund.

At least P12.8 billion in DAP went to the lawmakers in 2011-2012, Budget Sec. Butch Abad admits. That’s nearly half the annual PDAF, notes Lacson. Abad’s candidness about the totals does not make it clean. Lacson in fact links to the public debt the transfer of Executive funds to the Legislature in a disturbing way. If there are billions in budget savings and yet the government continues to borrow money, says he, then it’s all to facilitate plunder.

Aquino’s continuing popularity is due to widespread perception that he, amidst thieving politicos, is clean. Yet that’s no license for abuse, says Joker Arroyo, the ex-senator whom Malacañang routinely badmouths. DAP critics want all discretionary funds subjected to bottom-up, line-item budgeting. That way, precious government funds truly would be spent to eradicate poverty and ignorance. Consequently it would free the people from political dynasties, farcical elections, and debt. As the slogan circulating in blogs and social media states: Kung walang DAP/PDAF, walang mahirap.

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