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Monday, February 17, 2025

Lost

“Lost in translation or lost in comprehension?”

WAS it lost in translation?

FPRRD was reacting to the revelation made by Rep. Isidro Ungab of the third district of Davao City, once chair of the powerful Committee on Appropriations recently vacated by Elizaldy Co, about the bicameral conference committee report which became the basis of the GAB submitted to Malacanang.

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The discrepancies he claimed to be “invalid and unenforceable,” similar to a “blank check” were cured in the final GAA that PFRM Jr. signed into law in the last hours of 2024.

But Sid Ungab is not one to lie. Compared to the last two chairs of the most important HoR committee, he is most qualified.

After finishing his undergraduate studies at UP Los Banos, he took an MBA from the prestigious Asian Institute of Management, and when he was chairman of that committee, there were no such scandalous bicam committee reports.

Elizaldy Co, in fairness, sports an MBA from Legazpi City’s Aquinas University, and Eric Go Yap, his predecessor, finished architecture at the University of Santo Tomas. Did he design a huge building now rising in Tomas Morato on a lot which used to house a famous eatery, bought for a princely sum a few years back? Well, at least it is in QC and not in some rue in the Rive Droit in Paris.

The controversial committee report was rushed by the Co-Poe tandem, and like a “thief in the night,” was signed likely without reading by several senators and congressmen, riddled with Constitutional violation and “bawas-dagdag” which would make Virgilio Garcellano of Hello Garci a fourth-rate magician in contrast.

The president’s sister, Senadora Imee who did not sign the bicam report, delivered a privilege speech that advised her brother to return the report to Congress for the necessary corrections on what is now condemned by many as the “most corrupt budget in Philippine history.” Return to sender, she advised.

But the president decided to make cosmetic corrections instead, restoring some “bawas” by minimally reducing the “dagdag” in what he now admits to be a “sub-optimal” budget that he is trying to correct till now, post-facto, like a post-dated check that needs funding.

Hanggang ngayon, dinu-doktor. Because Congress mangled his National Expenditure Program, an insult to him and his economic managers.

Now the president, his ES plus his DBM are stating that FPRRD is dead wrong, calling him a “liar” even.

Yet, they refer to different things: a bicam report where fill in the blanks was resorted to and signed by the unthinking, while the other side is referring to a final GAA where the blanks had been filled, and some mix-and-match had been creatively but cosmetically made up.

***

Reacting to our previous column titled “Money,” reader Loy Agcaoili had a very sensible suggestion. Why not shift to digital, where banknotes can be eventually rendered obsolete?

“There will be no banknotes to give to a justice, a Cabinet secretary, a bureaucrat or a customs factotum…any (government) employee who can effect a digital transfer of an amount thrice his monthly salary can be questioned and anyone with more than what has been declared as its legal earning can be prosecuted…,” Mr. Agcaoili wrote.

Indeed there are ways if only there is political will, to flush out hidden wealth.

It reminds me of a contractor who once described to a now deceased official that an SUV can be filled up with as much as so many hundreds of millions in thousand-peso paper denominations.

He would fill up his SUV with that amount, drive it to the basement of a city hall building, park the vehicle, then go up to the office of the intended recipient and leave the key to the parked car.

The following day, he would retrieve his SUV back from the basement. At least the car did not go together with the bribe money.

Maybe for later use in another project? Sounds like “for later release,” or FLR, which the Co-Poe bicam and everyone in the DBM and Congress knows all too well the meaning of.

***

Lost in translation too is the interpretation done by a discalced chief justice of the highest court who in her medieval views about sex education, claimed that a Child Sex Education bill sponsored by Senadora Risa Hontiveros was full of XXX-rated provisions.

Even the president reacted that he would veto a bill that would encapsulate such “woke” provisions based on the falsehoods spread by the conservative thinkers who maintain that sex education is unhealthy, evil even.

But Hontiveros said that nowhere in her bill are terms like ”masturbation” or “try different sexualities” (galit si Trump diyan!) advocated.

Lost in translation or lost in comprehension?

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