Nakaka high blood magbasa ng ganitong news.
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20090513-204648/Now-it-is-a-P700-M-scam-at-DepEdAs the Arroyo administration winds to a close, her officials are scrambling to provide for their future. They are unfurling unofficial “golden parachutes†to tide them over when they are out of cushy government jobs. That is coming sooner than we think. So more and more anomalous contracts are being signed and public officials are becoming more brazen. Hundreds of millions of pesos are being diverted into the pockets of corrupt officials. Ala berde na. It is like the looting that almost always happens when a war comes to a close.
The latest scam discovered by Sen. Mar Roxas costs P700 million (the fertilizer scam at the Department of Agriculture was P738 million). Its victims are children, and it is taking place at the Department of Education. It is the department’s Food-for-School Program that for years has provided nutritional supplements to Filipino children like the nutribun and powdered milk supplied by the Americans during the Marcos era and lugaw during the Aquino years. This time, the food being supplied is noodles, but noodles that are very expensive. What ordinarily costs P5 a package, Roxas discovered, is being sold to the DepEd at P18 a pack. That’s an overprice of more than three times!
In the first Senate committee hearing on the issue, Roxas also discovered that only one company, Jeverps Manufacturing Inc., has won all of the contracts to supply instant noodles that the Arroyo administration has substituted as nutritional supplement for grade-school children and preschoolers nationwide.
Even officials of the DepEd who attended last Wednesday’s committee hearing were shocked upon learning that Jeverps has been supplying the department’s requirements of instant noodles since 2005.
Were public biddings held for the award of the supply contracts as the law requires? If there were, then the contracts must have been awarded to the highest bidder, not the lowest. Why is the DepEd paying P18 for each pack of instant noodles that costs only P5 in the markets? To whom will the overprice go? Who authorized the payment of P700 million to the noodle factory?
And why noodles? Noodles are nothing but flour, salt and monosodium glutamate (vetsin). It has very little nutritional value. What’s wrong with enriched rice? Or the nutribun which is very nutritious?
I’ll tell you why it is instant noodles and not rice or nutribun. It is because Jeverps manufactures noodles, not nutribuns or rice.
The victims of government scams are getting ever younger. First it was the old people who have to pay atrociously high prices for their maintenance drugs. Then it was the high-school and college students whose educational plans paid by their parents were used instead to line the pockets of unscrupulous businessmen. Now, even 5- and 6-year olds have not been spared.
Who will be next? Are these thieves even now plotting to steal from infants or even from unborn babies?
