The Senate has cut by P8 billion the P64 billion proposed budget for the government's cash doleout program, known variously as CCT or 4Ps. It is about time that anyone came to his sense on the cash doleouts. The program is a huge waste of money and has not achieved what, on paper, it supposedly set out to do -- help alleviate poverty, keep children healthy and in school.
Since its implementation at the start of the Noynoy Aquino presidency, the latest surveys still show that more and more Filipinos rate themselves as poor, or have not seen their lives improve in a significant and meaningful manner. Anywhere you go, but most especially in the urban areas where poverty is most palpable in the slums, you still see many children of school age out in the streets either begging or scraping for a living, or worse, getting trafficked in their own homes.
There are as yet no statistics taken to prove this, but I have a suspicion that the marked rise in drug addiction is a direct result of giving cash doleouts to people who did not break a sweat to deserve them. In addition to encouraging and promoting drug abuse, cash doleouts also serve to fuel other vices such as gambling, drinking, smoking and prostitution.
It is always unwise to just give money instead of using it to involve people in more productive and positive undertakings. But the Aquino government refused to heed well-intentioned warnings about the cash doleouts and went ahead with the program, fired by no other resolve than to frustrate its critics. It has a closed-minded approach to governance -- the more it is criticized, the more obstinate it becomes.
Aside from being abused and misused, the cash doleouts have also been used to curry political favors. Politicians have inserted themselves into the program so that they are involved in the identification and inclusion of beneficiaries who then become beholden to them. Even unqualified beneficiaries are tolerated because, in the end, it is not who benefit from the program but how many can be held beholden to politicians.
But the worst part is the padding of lists of beneficiaries because now it has evolved into a tool of corruption, which the Aquino government keeps vicariously promising to eradicate. Sad to say, though, the Aquino government has not only failed to eradicate corruption, it has allowed corruption to become the very hallmark of the administration.
Past administrations that were relentlessly accused of being corrupt at least never pretended they were not. All they did was offer limp denials that nobody naturally believed. But this administration is different. It proclaims itself to be squeaky clean, yet such claims fall flat in face of the wanton corruption that has tarnished many of its members, agencies and programs.
Corruption under this administration has evolved into an uncontrollable animal. While corruption in previous administrations often involved only its most basic manifestation which is stealing, now corruption even comes in the form of twisted sense of priorities and responsibilities. It may not be stealing to let foreign cash donations for supertyphoon Yolanda victims sit in the bank. But it is definitely couched in a corrupted sense of priorities and responsibilities.
The decision of the Senate to slash a portion of the cash doleouts for next year could be due to its realization that the program has not really served its purpose and that, with a presidential election coming, it is not farfetched to imagine the cash doleout getting totally phased out. Slashing off a portion now could be intended to make the transition less abrupt. Whatever it is, the money should be returned to the taxpayers in the form of more beneficial and truthful services.