A provincial officer of the Department of Social Welfare and Development in Bohol has come out in the open to say that some beneficiaries of the government's 4Ps Program, which gives cash doleouts to poor families, have not been using the money for the purpose that they were given. The DSWD official said the most common violations are the use of the money for expenses outside those specified in the program.
These out-of-line expenses may include anything from the purchase of cellphone loads to betting in gambling games. Some of the more creative violators are those who take out quick loans against their monthly cash doleouts. To ensure repayment, their ATM cards are given to the lenders who then use the cards to withdraw the money borrowed. Never has a government program been so violated.
To be sure, the problem is not unique to Bohol. If it is happening in Bohol, there is no reason why it should not be happening elsewhere. What makes the Bohol experience unique is that this is the first time a DSWD official has openly admitted the existence of irregularities governing the conduct of the program. Heretofore, the DSWD has been adamantly insisting that the government's conditional cash transfer, as 4Ps is also called, is a program made in heaven and thus could not go wrong.
How can the 4Ps program go wrong when it is a product of an inspired concept whipped up by no less than the DSWD's colorful head herself, Dinky Soliman, with enthusiastic approval by no less than President Aquino himself. Under the 4Ps Principle, the reason people are so poor is because they have no money. Only the dense could have missed that. So, for Soliman and Aquino, if the people are poor because they have no money, the solution is simply to give them money.
Funding for the program is in the billions of pesos and has been steadily rising. In the proposed budget for next year, the 4Ps program will be backstopped by something like in excess of 60 billion pesos. Yet, ironically, despite ever increasing doleouts, there are now more poor people than ever before. And because there are now more poor people than ever before, government will need to keep increasing the amount it needs to give the poor money.
It apparently never occurred to this government, much less to Soliman and Aquino, that it is now astride a vicious tiger from which there is no getting off without being eaten alive by the animal. Whoever succeeds Aquino and Soliman in 2016 has only two clear choices in relation to the 4Ps -- either find even more money to give to an ever increasing number of poor people, or abandon the program entirely and risk an uprising.
Whatever choices government may make, it cannot escape the realization that the 4Ps Program is a humongous folly that should not have been embarked on in the first place. We are not a country rich enough to be an unlimited welfare state. And if there are cheats in high and powerful places, why should there be no cheats in the slums? The poor never had it so good. And our taxpayers never had it so bad.