Granting that the news about the P10B Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) is true, (investigation by the Department of Justice thru the NBI is still ongoing) who is the worst thief? The akyat bahay thief who is forced to break thru the houses of peaceful citizens in order to feed his family, or the legislators whose PDAf projects have been reported to be implemented by fake and bogus NGOs? Senators and congressmen named by a former JLN employee turned whistle blower can always deny any knowledge much less involvement in the scam but how could they have overlooked detection of fake NGOs when they can see or detect the minutest defect in the laws under consideration by both Houses? If it didn’t reach to their attention that the NGOs they entrusted with their PDAF were bogus then perhaps they never reported to their constituencies the projects they have implemented in the last ten years or somebody would have told them already that “Hey we’ve never seen those projects in our community.” What rules are followed in the engagement of non-government organizations (NGOs) for implementation of PDAF projects? Doesn’t Congress have processes for accrediting NGOs that implement government projects?

We have no objection to NGOs and the Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) implementing government programs and projects especially in the local governments because from our experience NGOs and CSOs are more efficient and effective in implementing them. And only accredited NGOs by the Sanggunian can participate in the implementation of government projects. In the case of the senators and congressmen it appeared that they relied on the registration of those NGOs by the Securities and Securities Commission (SEC). That might make the existence of the NGOs registered by SEC legal but that does not prove that they are existing because there many SEC registered non-profit organizations that are no longer existing. Not being able to distinguish the fake from the real NGO for a year may be excusable. But for ten years without them knowing it? That is preposterous. What happened to their own monitoring and evaluation of their projects? Didn’t they have clear measures of success of their projects? If that is the case then the clamor for the abolition of the PDAF is standing on solid grounds. Legislators should be better left to legislative work and not to implementing projects. If they cannot account the benefits of their PDAF why should they, in the first place, be given such huge amount to dispose?

Personally, though, I am not inclined to favor the abolition of PDAF. True, a legislator’s job is to make laws. But given our culture where people don’t distinguish legislative from executive functions, the congressmen need to bring tangible projects to their constituencies lest they be tagged as good for nothing public officials. What needs to be done is to put in place stringent rules on who could implement PDAF projects. Better yet integrate the PDAF projects in the budget of the corresponding department of government where the project belongs. And by all means, run after all those scams who pocketed more than P10 B of people’s money that could have funded thousands of school classrooms, thousands of kilometers of farm-to-market roads and what have you. NOTES. The cursed road that used to be Lake Dao now sports patches of anapog to hide the lunar surface. Let’s hope that is the start of its full rehabilitation or restoration.