Honor Ninoy, ditch pork

The hobbit Frodo Baggins and the creature Gollum’s contest inside Mount Doom for the ring of power was the climax of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic novel, “The Lord of the Rings”.

Their arm wringing eventually led to the fall of the ring, together with Gollum over the precipice and into the mountain’s pit of flowing lava.

The ring of power had to be destroyed because it made mad and turned into a punisher anyone who held it and fell under its spell.

The priority development assistance fund or pork barrel fund are akin in the Philippine setting to Tolkien’s ring of power.

Filipinos have seen how it has become a means for legislators, the people’s supposed servants, to enrich themselves at the cost of perpetuating mass squalor.

They see no other way to respond to this blight on their dreams of a better motherland than to call on authorities, especially President Benigno Aquino III to permanently stop disbursing the funds.

The President was wrong when he said last Monday that the clamor to disabuse senators and congressmen of pork proceeds from the premise that it is being entirely misused.

Ours is a slowly maturing democracy, yet people are coming to realize that the duty of making and modifying a law or monitoring its implementation are incongruent with planning programs and implementing projects—tasks incumbent on public servants working in the executive branch of the government.

People are awakening to pork barrel that has become—to borrow a term from Catholic theology—a near-occasion of sin that distracts lawmakers from their main responsibilities, a temptation that turns them into Gollums thinking, “My precious” every time they sit down to work out the annual General Appropriations Act.

President Aquino only temporarily stopped the disbursement of pork barrel funds pending the probe on the scam involving fugitive Janet Napoles and several senators and congressmen because according to him, the money has good uses.

But Commission on Audit Chair Grace Pulido-Tan said that of the P12.018 billion in taxpayers’ money allocated to the pork barrel between 2007 and 2009, only 10 to 20 percent were spent on actual projects.

Mr. President, are you telling us to expect that the P25 billion earmarked as pork barrel funds for 2014 alone will be better spent by a fundamentally unchanged cast of crooks in Congress?

Your Excellency, we refer you today—the 30th anniversary of the assassination of the late senator Benigno Aquino Jr, your esteemed father and our hero—to words he once wrote to you:

“I have no material wealth to leave you; I never had time to make money while I was in the hire of our people… I have no doubt in the ultimate victory of right over wrong, of good over evil, in the awakening of the Filipino.”

In this national moment of awakening, your people, your bosses, Mr. President, pine for officials who will forego any claim to wealth while they are in the hire of every Filipino.

You abolish the pork barrel to Congress, you compel our legislators to serve this country as heroically as your father, our Ninoy did.