Presidential travels: Expenses versus foreign investments

The figures do not lie. The expenses of too many presidential travels are staggering and no significant foreign investments have come. The Palace issued an official statement to the press after the Commission on Audit's latest report showed the Office of the President incurred ?403.088 million in travel expenses in 2022, up by a whopping 995.6% or ?366.296 million from ?36.792 million total travel expenses in 2021.

Being the head of state and head of government of a poor country, President Bongbong Marcos should go slow in his frequent foreign and domestic travels and focus on solving the impending food crisis as acting secretary of Agriculture. The prime ministers and presidents of wealthy ASEAN member states like Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand are not travelling at the rate the Philippine president and his large entourage of sycophants are going on rampages of unabated global peregrinations. His apologists and drumbeaters often brag about billions of foreign investments that are supposedly generated out of these constant global tours. But nothing really comes or, at the most, only trickles of direct foreign investments.

The official records reveal beyond the shadow of any doubt that the presidential travels in 2022 alone ballooned to a whopping ?392.307 million or an unprecedented increase of 1,453% compared to 2021. The expenses of BBM in one year only exceeded by leaps and bounds the very small amount spent by President Duterte in his entire term of six years. The frequency and total expenses of BBM in less than two years in office has established a record exceeding the rates of expenses of all previous presidents from Aguinaldo and Quezon to Pinoy and Duterte. BBM even exceeded the rates of travel expenses of his own late father Ferdinand Marcos Sr. who overstayed in Malacañang from 1966 to 1986. This trend is very bad for the nation and the people who are suffering in extreme poverty.

There is no palpable evidence that this trend will slow down. Official reports indicate that from the ?671-million travel budget this year, President Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr. is getting ?1.15 billion to fund his travel expenses next year, raising questions on what foreign trips he has lined up.

Partylist Rep. Raoul Danniel A. Manuel pointed out that the president had included in his travel agenda two visits to Singapore to attend the F1 races last October and this month. Well, there is nothing wrong if this president loves car racing but since he comes from a struggling nation of too many poor people, he should go slow in spending public funds while millions of Filipinos are suffering in utter poverty.

All these are even exacerbated by the huge amount of confidential and intelligence funds. For 2021 and 2022, these funds reached no less than ?2.25 billion. If you compare these to the allocations for agriculture and the poverty alleviation allocation, one can readily conclude that budgeting in this country is quite questionable in relation to the more pressing and more urgent needs of addressing poverty through social services and assistance to the millions of suffering people. There is something very wrong in the way the government is allocating its scarce resources in relation to the priority needs of the nation and the people.

Malacañang always justifies these inordinate foreign travels by claiming that the president is looking out for foreign investments to come to our economy so as to leapfrog our development by generating jobs for our people and taxes for our government. But the data from the DTI indicate a very poor record of direct foreign investments. The official DTI records reveal that only nine out of 130 so-called projects having been audaciously bragged about had in fact been realized. That is an embarrassing record of less than 10% of what was drumbeat. Any freshman Economics student can do a quick cost-benefit analysis and realize that the gain is too minuscule compared to the huge expenses.

Neither the prime minister of the very rich Singapore nor the president of the biggest oil-producing country in ASEAN, Indonesia, is doing even one tenth of the travels being done by the Philippine president. And so, what is happening to our priorities, Mr. President? What is direction the Philippines is going?