By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
The driver of the cab I hailed the other day was complaining about his low daily take the past many weeks because of the incessant rains.
I then told him that almost everybody except the well heeled are struggling to survive. But as our very own Dr. Tedler Depaynos often say, we are blessed some other ways. So I tried to cheer up the cabbie.
I told him, we who earn a living daily such as taxi drivers, sari-sari store owners, practicing lawyers and doctors and other professionals, etc., are even better off. If we don’t make much today or on any given day, or even not make anything at all, we might be able to make up for that dad day on the next day, or on the next week. How about the farmer who might have borrowed heavily from the neighborhood usurer to be able to plant something this season so he will have something to harvest six months from now? He would be lucky if his plants were not destroyed by these two months of continuous rains. His plants could have been drowned by floods or otherwise got rotten because of too much water. Whatever dire straits he might be in, it will take him about six months to try and recoup his losses. That is, if he and his family would not have already died of hunger.
If they survived, he would be heavily indebted to the usurer who might have spent these very wet days tacked warmly in bed watching a telenovela on TV or reading an entertaining book, while counting in between the usurious interests he will soon collect from his suffering debtors. But of course he will soon get the bad karma in the form or incurable diseases as most of his ilk often get.
Then I asked the cabbie, so which would you prefer in these circumstances? Being a taxi driver or a farmer.
The only way to shield small farmers from the wrath of nature such as typhoons or the opposite, drought, is to have a reliable agricultural insurance system like what they have in some developed countries. Here in the Philippines the government is starting to implement one but the government is the government. Anything it runs is inefficient or will go bankrupt in the near future. While we can hope that things will be different this time, that the crop insurance it is trying to establish will become a viable service to small farmers so they won’t get wiped out every time their crops are destroyed by calamities, this would be hoping against hope.
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Finally, the decision many Cordillerans had been waiting for—the dismissal of the two highest ranking officials of the Department of Transportation-Cordillera Administrative Region finally came. I am referring to Natividad and Abbas who finally got dismissed or fired from the service.
The DOTr whose name, like any other government agency, is always being changed had always been corrupt since time immemorial. Well, government agency was and is not?
Just like the DOTr, every government agency should be headed by what PDu30 described as “killers.” The President delayed the appointment of somebody to head the PAGCOR because according to him “he was looking for a killer.” He explained that by saying the people there are very corrupt and the person who should head it must be a killer who will fire people left and right to cleanse it.
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There is an article in one of the pages of this issue about a mobile strike force that could be readily dispatched to any part of Benguet to protect citizens or law enforcers in case of any NPA attack.
Sure, this is a good idea but the weakness of the police or the military is usually the lack of good intelligence. The reason? The fund for intelligence is usually being corrupted by the generals. Without enough funds, good intelligence on enemies of the state will always be a dream.
So since the military and police personnel are killers, literally, the President needs the primus inter pares (the first among equals) or the best killer among killers to head the military or police. Because there is so much corruption there. Just recently, PDu30 fired many generals at the V. Luna military hospital due to big corruption at the expense of the lives of soldiers and policemen wounded in the battlefield or otherwise needing other kinds of medical attention.**
