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The hostage-taking of 32 students is symbolic of
what’s wrong with our educational system and with our politicians.
A bus with about 30
schoolchildren on the way to Tagaytay was seized by a gunman near
Manila City hall at 9:20 Wednesday morning. The kidnapper, a certain
Jun Ducat, in crisp and eloquent Tagalog delivered what to me is the
best campaign speech of the season—a demand for schooling of 145
tykes at the Musmos Day Care center, a scathing attack on
corruption, and a denunciation of how corrupt politicians are. The
publicity stunt by an obviously sane hostage taker was covered live
by international television, notably, the CNN, though without
Ducat’s impassioned harangue.
A few days earlier, the Social
Weather Stations came out with a survey showing 19 percent of
Filipino families have suffered hunger at least once in the past
three months, a pretty loose way to measure hunger. One out of five
translates into 3 million families.
By coincidence, a senator tried
to come to the rescue of the Manila hostages. He promised to send to
school the 145 kids who need schooling.
By coincidence, there are 3
million kids of school age who are not in school because of extreme
poverty. This means that these 3 million kids come from the same 3
million households which suffer from hunger. No food, no schooling.
That’s a deadly combination that if multiplied nationwide
constitutes a social volcano. These people need to climb back to the
ladder of economic emancipation or they will tear the country apart.
How many more Ducats are out
there nurturing an inner rage because of the lopsided income
disparity in this country, the worst in the entire world of 178
countries?
It is not for want of money that
3 million Filipinos suffer from hunger and 3 million kids are out of
school.
There is money. President Arroyo
has ordered the release of P1 billion to end hunger in six months.
Senators get P200 million each in
pork barrel, or P5 billion for the entire 24-member Senate.
Congressmen get P70 million each, or P16.5 billion for the entire
Congress. The legislature has P21.5 billion in total pork barrel,
money that is often spent needlessly on insignificant projects such
as basketball courts, open concrete yards used as recreational or
baranggay halls, overpriced medicines, overpriced books and
irrigation on concrete roads in urban areas.
It takes only P5,000 a year to
support a school dropout, or P15 billion to send back all 3 million
out-of-school youngsters to school. That’s less than the
P21.5-billion pork barrel of all our senators and congressmen. The
remaining P6.5 billion can be used for soup kitchens and rice
dole-outs to hungry families.
Actually, we can padlock Congress
today and it wouldn’t make any difference in the future of this
country. We will save P21.5 billion immediately—money that can
cure hunger and send OSYs back to school. We already have 15,000
laws, including the latest monstrosity, the Antiterror Law of 2007.
It’s time people expressed
outrage over the horrendous amounts of taxpayers’ money being
squandered by senators and congressmen.
Otherwise, we will not see the
end of enraged and insane people taking matters in their own hands,
seizing hostages and making demands. Under the new law, those acts
will be classified as terrorism beginning July 14 this year.
But a case can be made that the
bigger terror is actually Congress for seizing taxpayers’ money
known as pork barrel to waste on projects that won’t feed the
hungry nor send poor kids to school.
--biznewsasia@gmail.com
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