It is no secret that the national budget allocation is outrageously disproportionate. With the recent discovery of the “mother of all scams,” the need to question the seemingly arbitrary distribution of national funds has intensified.
The congress budget hearings began in August, and as of now the national budget for 2014 has been pegged at around 2.3 trillion pesos–300 million pesos more than the 2013 budget.
The pork barrel system dictates that 70 million pesos is given to each member of the Congress, while 200 million is given to each member of the Senate. Though the congress has decided to scrap the 27-billion-peso allocation for the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), there are more inconsistencies when it comes to the budget allocation for different sectors.
For instance, the Department of Education and Culture was given the biggest budget in 2013: 292.7 billion pesos, approximately 16.11% of the total budget. However, this raises the question of whether or not this massive amount of money is actually being put to good use. Countless reports have been filed of our schools lacking classrooms, chairs, blackboards—the laundry list of lack goes on and on.
Another prime example is the budget for military spending. In 2013, the budget allocated for the Department of National Defense (DND) totaled 80.6 billion pesos. Though the amount seems large at face value, it does not appear to be trickling down. This, however, does not come as a surprise.
After all, the Philippines has long been touted as one of the most corrupt countries in the world; most of that money has ended up in someone else’s pocket. The problem of corruption does not start and end in the upper rungs of the government; because of its ubiquity, our soldiers are forced to beg for money on the streets since they cannot afford to buy food.
Issues of corruption aside, 80.6 billion pesos is a mere pittance considering how much is required to upgrade our almost archaic defenses. The DND recently spent a little over 1 billion pesos on a pair of 40-year-old warships, making them some of the newest and most technologically advanced vessels of our navy.
Given our current situation involving the unresolved territorial dispute with China, it is shocking that the government did not decide to invest more in trying to defend the Philippines from potential foreign military threats.
The Chinese budget for their military alone is 115.7 billion dollars—twice as large as our total national budget. We cannot rely merely on foreign intervention and the United Nations to keep the Philippines safe from such overwhelmingly powerful outside forces.
While the country is up in arms, struggling to change a system riddled with lies and inequity, we are still faced with ambiguous financial decisions and the inevitable problems that come with them. While the solution obviously isn’t allocating more funds to the departments that seem to need it the most, transparency is key.
