People are hungry. People are jobless. People are dying. People’s businesses are bankrupt. And we hear of companies like Pharmally, in cahoots with Palace officials, cheating us of billions and billions of pesos.
Then as we were expecting a bleak Christmas, came out exposes of the robbing of our national patrimony through the sale of majority of the shares of stock of the Malampaya gas company to Dennis Uy, a crony of President Duterte. It was the mother of all crony deals. The government could have bought the controlling shares of Chevron for the Filipino people but decided to let Dennis Uy have it. AS it must have been the plan in the first place.
By the way, cronyism has acquired a new meaning. It does not refer anymore to ordinary deals between friends. It now refers to a huge deal of government with a friend of the head of state to immorally siphon the people’s money or asset to the pockets of that friend and the head of state.
They usually make sure that such deals are couched with legality if you are looking at the letter of the law, but are always immoral as these are meant to rob the people of their money or patrimony.
So the Malampaya deal, along with the sound of hungry and grumbling tummies, would be ringing in our heads as spiritless Christmas carols would be wafting in the air.
Crony deal after crony deal? There is that feeling deep within that WE AIN’T SEEN NOTHING YET as the election approaches.
Sadly, when the election heats up, we the people would forget everything, including how we are being robbed big time. We would be concentrating then in informal and useless debates with friends, neighbors, relatives or mere acquaintances on who are the better candidates.
The arguments would be shallow or uninformed, but emotional and illiterate or stupid that we are, our delivery of our arguments would be impassioned as if our lives depended on these. Some in drinking sprees would even be hacking or stabbing each other with bolos.
These determine our kind of life…… which inexorably goes on.**