Many decades ago, the Central Bank (before BSP) launched a campaign to ‘Respect the centavo.’ The centavo was a coin that people chose to ignore.
The coin was often simply thrown away. Some prefer the hard candies supermarket cashiers give. I remember paying a jeepney driver 10 one-centavo coins for my 10-centavo fare and the driver just threw the coins away.
As a kid just learning about money, I was confused by the driver’s reaction to my coins. Apparently, the Central Bank was also perplexed by this lack of respect. It is costing them more than one centavo to mint the coin.
So, they launched a campaign to urge the public to ‘respect the centavo.’ But they soon gave up and stopped circulating the one-centavo coin. It was beyond respect.
These days, we need a serious campaign to urge our officials to respect the peso. our tax peso. It really hurts deeply to learn that they are calling the hard-earned pesos we pay in taxes as basura.
In any case, those pesos won’t stay pesos for long. Those ill-gotten pesos are quickly exchanged for dollars. They don’t trust the peso to store value. Since they have private jets and high government positions, transporting oodles of cash to Hong Kong shouldn’t be a problem.
The lower-level crooks at the district engineer level also have no desire to keep those bundles of peso bills too long. They quickly gamble away hundreds of millions worth of our tax pesos at casinos. Or splurge on high-end cars from their friendly neighborhood smuggler.
Congressmen are the most disrespectful of our tax pesos. When they have private meetings, wines costing a thousand US dollars and up are said to flow freely.
Catered food must be costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of pesos every day.
The senators, on the other hand, are also quite disrespectful. They sought to tickle their bloated egos with a new building whose costs cannot be justified by a government already saddled with heavy borrowings.
From an initial cost of P8.9 billion, the cost has ballooned to P24 billion or about a billion per senator. But it couldn’t be completed at that cost.
Based on the latest report of the DPWH, the estimated building cost has reached P31.6 billion, excluding the payment for the parcel of land and furniture. This is equivalent to more than P240,000 per square meter.
GMA News noted that if based on the Construction Cost Handbook Philippines 2024 of Arcadis Philippines, the per-square-meter cost of a quality high-rise office could reach P183,000.
What happens if a Constitutional revision abolishes the Senate? Public sentiment today favors such an abolition. The Senate has been a heavy expense that contributes more to corruption than the national good.
Then there is the BSP which under then governor Ben Diokno signed contracts to construct a new building at Clark. There is no reliable estimate for total project cost but Diokno is saying it will be less than P50 billion. Given past experiences with government projects, it will probably exceed that.
Does the BSP need a billion-dollar facility at Clark? And the Governor and Monetary Board members won’t even move there although they will likely be given offices there. As if they need two offices!
So, the Clark office will not contribute to decongesting Metro Manila as Diokno claimed. Is it a legacy monument to remind everyone he was once BSP governor?
Diokno said the new building would not be funded by the National Budget but by BSP reserves set aside from BSP’s net income from past years.
A former NEDA chief who was once a Monetary Board member was unimpressed. He said the project is still a wasteful and extravagant use of funds.
‘Better declare them as dividends to NG for building new classrooms and school feeding. It is a socially irresponsible project.’
The former official has a point. DepEd estimates a current backlog of 165,000 classrooms. But Sen. Bam Aquino thinks this number is understated given a good number of classrooms are dilapidated and unusable.
Is a new luxurious BSP building a national priority compared to these classrooms and yes, hospital buildings to provide badly needed health care to our people?
The money for the BSP building may not be coming from the national budget but it betrays the distorted sense of priorities our high officials have in the light of our third world country’s basic needs. Total lack of respect for the peso in government hands that should be spent properly.
Speaking of the BSP, it was shocking to learn that the scale of corruption and the sheer volume of cash involved in the DPWH ghost projects shocked monetary regulators.
That’s because the country’s most highly paid government employees are content being stuck in their plush offices rather than being curious enough to find out what is going on in the real world.
BSP officials were oblivious to the fact that the banks they are regulating are complicit in this mess. Worse, it is the LandBank that seems the guiltiest of rolling out the red carpet to facilitate the huge cash transfers behind ghost DPWH projects.
The Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC), which the BSP governor chairs, also only started acting after the mess hit the headlines. Natutulog sila sa pansitan!
The AMLC most likely acted too late in freezing over 700 accounts linked to the DPWH mess. Given the ease of transferring money to overseas banks, the legislators and contractors involved most probably moved their stash before the sleepy AMLC folks took notice.
All these shows lack of respect for the peso by our officials tasked with running our government. Elected, appointed, highly paid or not, they all seem to be the same. Sad for all of us paying our hard-earned pesos in taxes to sustain them.