By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
There are different ways of doing it. Some rob banks, others would just kidnap a rich Chinoy businessman or any member of his family for ransom. The ransom money would be contributed to the war chest of a candidate. The people who would pull off the heist would be military or police officers or former ones. Those in power could just assign the task to his police or military officers who want to go up the ranks. “You produce P100 million, you P50 million, and you P40 million”, so forth and so on. Producing such amounts might be mind boggling to some, but for some generals they would just say, “Isang intsik lang ‘yan.” Meaning, all it takes is to kidnap one rich Filipino Chinese.
Those amounts are still peanuts to a candidate running for a national office like that of a senator. A decent senatorial campaign would need at least a P1 billion budget.
For the incumbents or those being groomed by the incumbents for some powerful elective posts, raising money for an election war chest is much easier. Put people in juicy positions in government and they will take care of that. Thus there are SOPs or grease money to be paid by contractors before they could get government contracts.
The cementing of a road for instance if it is a provincial road would require the payment of SOP at 25% to 30% of the value of the contact to the governor. If a national road, the payment would be to the congressman of the district as he is the national official in the area. This would be aside from payments of smaller amounts to lowly bureaucrats so the value of the contracted project could be collected.
One of the reasons for such grease money is that some of it will go to the campaign fund of some national bigwigs.
There is now a tsismis going around that a P645 million road improvement project along Kennon Road is being peddled to contractors, but so far no takers. The reason is that a politician is asking for 35% as grease money and another 10% for the DPWH people. Then the contractor has to think about the taxes he will have to pay come collection time. Then he will have to grease some hands or the factotums in charge of processing the payment.
What will be left to implement the project? And the returns for the contractor? Just nickels and dimes. Ever wondered why our infrastructures are so bad?
There is now a gold rush, nay just a rush, for the henchmen of those in power to be placed in government, in quasi-government positions, or in government corporations. Any vacancy is fair game, but the juicier the better.
About a decade ago, I met an incumbent politician who said that his opponent, a former incumbent, was stupid because he did not spread the gravy to his supporters. “He could have asked for just 10% from each contractor and then distribute the projects to them”, he said. But years after his incumbency, he was doing the same thing, as he became a lot greedier. He cornered all the projects In his district and he would distribute on the eve of each election hundreds of millions of pesos to buy the votes. He became politically invincible. As all the infrastructures in his province became so substandard. If not ghost projects. That is, nothing of the budget reached the ground. All of it went to his pocket.
And then prakriti (Sanskrit term for ‘nature’) intervened. He suddenly died.
I guess he never learned that GOD stands for Generator, Operator and Destroyer. And the D comes at the end.**
