Pork

There is another dimension to this unfolding scandal over the Sanofi vaccines that might tend to be underplayed: the outrageous fact that the drugs were distributed following the typical lines of the pork barrel.

I take the cue from the admission of the previous health secretary that she considered stopping the vaccination program but was “bullied” into continuing with it by congressmen. These congressmen, strangely, will be the ones conducting a public hearing on possible corruption accompanying the rush purchase of P3.5 billion worth of vaccines and the indecent haste with which the immunization was carried out on unsuspecting children.

The pork barrel culture is deep-set. It dictates how goodies and freebies from the state are distributed. This is the reason we have “district” hospitals and why undermanned and substandard state colleges proliferate.

Recall that incident years ago when the Congress decided to distribute El Nino assistance supposedly to help alleviate the effects of the drought. It was a thinly disguised program to supplement congressional pork. The fund was distributed evenly to all the districts whether they required alleviation or not.

Deep well projects abounded --- and of course quickly dried up because they were drilled so close to each other. The metropolitan area was threatened with subsidence, requiring the deep wells to be plugged.

This was a huge waste of money. But it allowed the politicians to make a show of bringing home the bacon to their constituencies. They do not much care for the efficiency of public investments.

I recall the time when I was helping design the nautical highway (ro-ro) system to improve the country’s logistics backbone. A group of provincial governors called on me to complain about why their areas were not directly benefited by projects relating to this system. Obviously, their areas were not aligned with the system under design.

Apparently, they then brought their complaints to then President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Shortly after, Arroyo asked a copy of the ro-ro map to be set up in her office in order to enlighten politicians about the concept.

I have always maintained the principal reason why our nation’s infra backbone is so incoherent and chronically deficient is the pork barrel culture.

Instead of the state spending its scarce economic investments in strategic infrastructure that will spur local economies, those investments were cut up and evenly distributed according to districts. The result is an abundance of “micro” infra projects such as bus stops and fabulous arches demarcating the boundaries between towns. Investing state funds in strategic infra such as, for instance, modernizing the Manila airport to support trade and tourism would have lasting economic multiplier effects. Building marble arches to demarcate one poor town from the next one yielded no economic benefit.

Former Senator Ramon Revilla Sr. is a classic in this regard. He spent the major portion of his pork barrel dotting the province of Cavite with overbuilt (and possibly overpriced) bus stops. Many of those structures have since been torn down to make way for road widening or simply because they were considered aesthetically disagreeable.

Some of us might recall that gregarious totally concrete and over-lighted “park” along Edsa leading to the Bonifacio Monument in Caloocan. It was torn up shortly after a change in the administration of the city, mainly because it ate up precious lanes of Edsa and caused terrible traffic jams. They could have used the money to build new schools.

When I was doing research on pork barrel spending during the nineties, I encountered a strange, technocratic-sounding item of spending that recurred across congressional districts. The item specified “multi-purpose solar driers.” On inspection, these turned out to be basketball courts, used during the harvest to dry grain and on other occasions to host local festivities. Of course, all of them duly advertised the names of the politicians who made them possible. It was indelible as political advertising.

I could go on and on. But the point has been made. Over the years, we have wasted billions, probably trillions, of pesos building useless “micro” infra instead of strategic ones. This is because politicians, not engineers or economists, determined how the public money would be spent.

The same pork barrel mentality pervaded over the vaccination program apparently. Instead of limiting the program to specific areas where the incidence of dengue was high, the vaccines were distributed across nearly all districts. Therefore, the procurement of the vaccines had to be in huge volume and the program hurriedly implemented. It was hurriedly implemented because the elections of 2016 were quickly closing in.

Of course, if kickbacks happened in this humungous P3.5 billion single purchase, then scale was a good thing. It did not matter if this huge program was haphazardly undertaken or if the vaccine proved to the detriment of some of the children.

This has all the hallmarks of the previous administration.

The Aquino III administration was pork barrel driven. Recall that it tripled the size of the pork barrel to win political support, until the Supreme Court ruled against the practice. It freely moved around funds in defiance of the Congress’ power over the purse, a practice the Supreme Court ruled to be patently unconstitutional. It used supplemental pork allocations to impeach Chief Justice Renato Corona and otherwise freely dispensed with the “savings” it commandeered.

Noynoy Aquino was by no means an epidemiologist, yet considered massive vaccination an urgent thing to be done. And indeed the thing was done. Decided upon in December 2015, the vaccines were bought, delivered and disseminated by April 2016.