The past couple of weeks, we’ve been bombarded with news of one
government scandal after another — from the ZTE-NBN deal and golf
meeting offers to the impeachment vote bribes, to the Malacañang brown
paper pabaons. These unfolding series brings together a cast from
various government units, as it bares exchanges among powerful players
including appointed and elected officials. It’s not just the scale of
corruption and the amount of bribes and kickbacks that make the cases
shocking and explosive. It’s also the way that the cases are insidiously
interconnected, rather than separate, isolated incidents. We bear
witness to a trail of kickbacks and bribes, one deal spawning,
requiring, demanding yet another, underscoring the critical engine that
actually drives this government: grease money.
The ZTE-NBN project alone demonstrates the kind of grease going around
these days. If we go by Joey De Venecia’s statement, the project was
overpriced by 100%, with at least $160 million dollars allotted for the
pockets of Mike ’Mystery Man’ Arroyo and other related ’items’ such as
pay offs and bribes to competing firms (Amsterdam Holdings, 10 million
dollars), possible collaborators (NEDA chief Romulo Neri was offered 200
million pesos), and close cohorts (COMELEC Commissioner Abalos? ). The
Chinese government provides a soft loan to cover the bloated cost of the
project, under the condition that a Chinese firm bags the deal. ZTE gets
the broadband project, Mystery man and company anticipates its cut,
Comelec Commissioner goes around offering bribes to swing officials in
favor of ZTE, a competing firm proposing a BOT scheme is told to ’back
off’ and we almost end up with yet another anomalous debt.
The dimensions of this sort of plunder is so incomprehensible, it has to
be spelled out. We’re talking about officials incurring loans, with our
names on it that only serves to fatten their bank accounts. We’re
talking about $ 160 million dollars worth of grease that adds to our
national debt, which we end up paying for, with our taxes. The three
percent interest on the grease alone translates to an added burden of
approximately $ 4.8 million dollars. That’s an added P211 million pesos
worth of interest payments that we have to shoulder each year, thanks to
their kick backs and cuts. We’re talking about the way, our government
officials, their friends and families, can just easily cook up such a
scam, at our expense. It’s an unbelievably shameless and incorrigible
scheme that they expected to carry out right before our noses. That is,
until Joey de Venecia exposed the whole scam, which led to a Senate
inquiry and headline after headline that links the president’s family to
our generation’s Bataan Nuclear Power Plant. GMA retreats and the
ZTE-NBN deal is scrapped. But then again, it doesn’t end there.
The $329M ZTE-NBN scam generated enough dirt for the president to get
impeached, analysts say. The impeachment buzz over the ZTE-NBN scandal
begets new cases of bribery and pay offs to insulate the president.
Listen to the reports and you’ll find an exaggerated version of the game
show ’Deal or No Deal. Those who go ’deal’, get as little as P200,000 to
as much as $10 million dollars. Before ZTE spilled over to Congress,
Joey de Venecia was being offered $10 million dollars by Abalos, just so
he would ’back off’ the project. Former NEDA Chief Romulo Neri would’ve
gotten P200 million, had he accepted Abalos’ proposition.
Representatives in the house were offered P2 million pesos, according to
Represenative Beltran, to favor the ’weak’ impeachment. Governors and
Mayors, according to Gov. Ed Panlilio, got loot bags containing P
200,000 to P 500,000 after their breakfast meeting in Malacañang. It’s
these ’deals’ that seem to link the different government agencies and
institutions, from COMELEC to NEDA to CONGRESS to MALACAÑANG down to the
different LGUs of the archipelago. Rather than set up a broadband
network that would ensure the smooth coordination of government offices,
this whole National Broadband Network episode brought to light an
existing ’ bribeband network’ that facilitates the sinister collusion of
government officials.
Of course, grease money isn’t just about who gets how much. It’s about
projects being bloated to accommodate the kind of grease that has to go
around. It’s about loans we have to make to finance the grease projects.
It’s about anomalous debts that taxpayers have to pay. It’s about
Comelec commissioners suddenly becoming jetsetters, spreading the word
about a project that promises to link up the different agencies of
government, dangling millions of pesos for possible ’interagency
collaboration’. It’s about impeachment cases being resolved in
Malacañang and not in the halls of Congress. It’s about our
representatives being bought. It’s about cash being spread around to
keep the whole thing together.
In every sense of the term, SOP, the euphemism for cuts, kickbacks and
payoffs, has become standard operating procedure, spearheaded by the
highest officials of the land. Standard operating procedure describes
the way millions can be offered and taken so casually and so frequently.
It portrays the manner that this perverse protocol has become so
ubiquitous and pervasive. It explains how easily certain officials can
turn their backs, invoke executive privilege and move along, just
because they didn’t take the money. It captures how other officials can
promptly rationalize their acts, even if they did take the money. It
accounts for elected officials just going public about how these gifts
are actually ’common practice’. It depicts the way a president can get
away with just saying “huwag mong tanggapin”. It tells us why we can
just shake off the news, and ignore the fact that this whole fiasco
started escalating around the same time the budget hearings have been
taking place in Congress.
Think about it. On the one hand, long grueling debates on how to make
ends meet, extensive discussions on how much money should go to which
agency, how little is left to health, education and other social
services. On the other hand, quick, casual meetings, with hundreds of
millions of pesos up for grabs in just one encounter, where half a
million can easily be handed out, to hundreds of officials— no
vouchers, no line items, no questions asked. Now, what’s wrong with this
picture?
What we are seeing now tells us that grease money does not only
’facilitate’ transactions (’pampadulas’). It characterizes how state
institutions relate with each other. It determines which policies;
projects and programs are thought of, initiated and carried out. It
dictates the sort of loans and deals we get into. It defines the way
this government operates. Forget about sound governance and a strong
republic, this is how things are run under the Grease Money
Administration. The thing is, as SOPs have gone higher and higher, our
standards of governance have sunk lower and lower.