“We wonder why few foreign investments and tourists come to our country, despite 27 globe-trotting visits by our president to promote our country as a tourism and investment destination”
IT TAKES nature’s wrath for people to ask what happened to the taxes they pay. Calamities have a way of exacting the wages of corruption and neglect.
Reason why the hearings the houses of Congress are about to call regarding the massive floods that inundated Metro Manila and the neighboring lowlands of Regions 3 and 4 are likely to be just sound and fury, resulting in little if anything.
Here we go again.
This is not to mention some parts of the Visayas and Mindanao, plus Mindoro, which likewise reeled under massive torrents of water from Carina, in some cases even with lesser typhoons.
Then of course we have landslides that almost marooned Baguio City and Benguet, were it not for Marcos Highway.
And we haven’t seen the worst of the typhoons that will visit the country this year, when a strong El Nino with the warm waters of the Pacific induce stronger cyclones, and in these days of climate change, an immediate La Nina backlash.
Our legislators will again excoriate DPWH officials, who will give lame excuses, yet meekly submit to being the “usual suspects,” unable to hit back at the legislators who have been cornering the contracts, either for their own companies, or due to huge kickbacks from their “favorite” projects — flood control, river dredging, and landslide prevention netting and rip-raps.
“Favorite” because it is not so easy to detect the shoddy construction or rehabilitation, thus making these projects made for massive corruption.
Of course, there still are farm-to-market roads, ostensibly to help farmers bring their produce more conveniently to the market, better known as “farm-to-pocket” projects, another favorite of our lawmakers, although you would wonder if there are still areas unreached by the millions of kilometers of these farm-to-market roads inserted into the national budget since time immemorial.
And what about illegal logging cum kaingin the DENR and LGUs have failed to stop, and which denuded our forests such that topsoil flows down our rivers, causing siltation that makes these tributaries shallow, and rainwater rampaging from hills and mountains which no more trees are able to mitigate?
This is one mortal sin that our elected and appointive officials commit with grievous repetition, incompetence, and criminal neglect larded with an overload of corruption, resulting in the loss of lives and property and the prized possessions of common people.
As for the metropolis where thousands of flood control projects and pumping stations have been “built,” there is the added scourge of garbage thrown mindlessly by citizens that clog the waterways and the drainage systems which have cost us billions in taxpayer money.
A few years back, government dug the national roads close to our residence, Taft Avenue and Leon Guinto, and installed huge drainage systems underneath.
The following year or two, we noticed flooding became less of an occurrence, or, if they did, the waters subsided quickly, so we were comforted with the thought that what happened with Ondoy was a thing of the past.
With Typhoon Carina though, the floods got knee-high, and on certain parts of perpendicular streets like Estrada and Vito Cruz, waist-deep and even more. What happened?
Till now, nobody segregates garbage, except, and I do not know if they still do, in Marikina, following the late Mayor Bayani Fernando’s strict leadership, followed by his equally effective wife Marides.
Then we wonder why few foreign investments and tourists come to our country, despite 27 globe-trotting visits by our president to promote our country as a tourism and investment destination.
One video reel in CNN or BBC and who the hell would want to come?
Ah, but there are of course, the POGOs, the drug traffickers and scam artists who find ours such a “welcoming” haven.
There is something in our culture that guarantees this impunity against erring officials and the recidivism of wasted opportunities, despite trillions of public funds thrown into these perennial problems.
That is, we Filipinos tend to forgive too easily, and forget too quickly.
Maybe our Christian moorings promote this forgive and forget attitude.
How I sometimes wish we were otherwise, like South Korea for instance where presidents are jailed, or Japan where erring officials commit hara-kiri rather than face shame, or China, or Vietnam.
