Plundered

FIRST PERSON

- ALEX MAGNO

The nation has been plundered. With every rainfall, the calamity becomes more profound. Our people are tormented by the floods in so many ways. We are the people Noah left behind. Had the trillions of pesos allocated for flood control been used properly, our feet might be dry. But now we have to wade through dirty waters to get to work. If we are to be rescued from this fate, it will have to be by our own means.

In Indonesia, the past few days, riots broke out, homes of elected officials were invaded by mobs and items of luxury thrown into bonfires. Among the reasons for the rage was the discovery that legislators gave themselves $3,000 per month in allowances. That is such a pitiful sum compared to what our legislators get—legally or otherwise.

The more we know about what happened leading to the looting of hundreds of billions related to the flood control projects, the more we understand the scale of the failure of governance that we suffer from. There were so many red flags all around. It required such an assiduous effort to ignore them.

Perhaps the biggest red flag in this case is the fact that it is our legislators that identify public works projects, insert funding for them in the national budget and, consequently, receive a cut from the corruption chain where they are recognized as "funders." It is shocking that these public works projects were undertaken without coordination with the local government units.