The Philippine Online Chronicles

There was one incident in the bible which Jesus fed a few thousands with just a handful of loaves of bread and a bale of fish. That incident happened 4,000 years ago and which remains as a classic “urban legend” if you may about Jesus. Fast forward and we see something like this happen not in the dry, arid deserts of Palestine, but in the hot and simmering tropical city of Quezon City. And this time, the perpetuator is not a Prophet, but a vice mayor.

Quezon city vice mayor Herbert Bautista stands accused of one crime—that of feeding 2,500 people for twelve months. GMA’s golden haired boy Mike Defensor has accused him of spending close to 9 million pesos a month feeding 2,500 Quezon city residents without the requisite bidding, as required by law. Bautista defended himself by saying that the Council authorized these “emergency procurements” except that, the procurements went longer than expected. The emergency lasted for a year.

Nothing wrong with what Bautista did. Taking care of one’s constituents is not a crime, especially when these constituents need to be fed. What is so wrong, and this is probably the thinking of most Quezon city residents, including Philip Lustre and this writer is why skirt the regular bidding process, for something which Bautista himself said, is a program of the Quezon city government, not just a project.

If 8 to 9 million pesos were spent feeding 2,500 drug dependents and what-have-you, thrice in a day, then, why was this done with just one caterer and why was that caterer favored among others?

Probably Herbert Bautista thought that those drug dependents have to be fed immediately and if he gets money from the regular bidding process, it would take a great deal of time. So, like Solomon, Bautista probably decided to just give the contract to his favorite caterer and damn the bidding process.

Feeding programs are just some of the easier ways on how to get funds. For one, it is quite hard to audit such procurements and two, the only way to find these out is quite simple—read the receipts. If receipts reflect disproportionate amounts or if amounts as large as 250,000 pesos in just one single feeding event, expect one with a hawkish eye to point out the difference.

For Herbert Bautista though, no such anomaly exists, for it is perfectly easy to compute it:

“There’s 2,500 people and there’s 10 programs. Base your computations in weeks and months and you’ll arrive at nothing more than what was reflected in those receipts.”

Okey, based on records the average cost of one meal is 40 pesos. Feeding 2,500 people will cost 100,000 pesos per meal. One feeding day costs 300,000 pesos. Feeding them for a month cost 9 million pesos. Feeding them for a year cost 108 million pesos.

Such a huge amount, according to the law, requires a public bidding but in this case, no such thing. This is just an emergency procurement and for a city that has a 6 billion peso surplus, what is 108 million pesos, but just a drop in a huge bucket.

And Quezon city residents will have no chance of really finding out what happened to their 108 million pesos. If they want to audit it, they only need to read those receipts and those attestations by Herbert Bautista himself that those meals were delivered.

Anyway, those 2,500 people are still living and will attest that they ate those meals themselves. The problem really is—what if even one or two said they did not see even a morsel of rice from those meals, what then, Vice Mayor Bautista?

By the way, if those were regular programs, surely, the City government already provided for their upkeep and that includes food. Why do an emergency procurement for a regular program such as drug rehabilitation? Don’t tell me that the taxes I pay to Quezon City as a resident did not go to these programs and centers and these ten programs lack allocation for food? If the city has a 6 billion peso surplus, don’t tell me that part of this surplus were savings sourced from allocations which were not released for these programs? Meaning, Bautista saw that Mayor Belmonte and the entire Council were trying to starve these drug dependents, and that’s why he immediately ordered an emergency procurement costing us 108 million pesos more? Bautista has under his disposal 300 million pesos, and he spent more than a hundred million feeding 2,500. Sixty five percent of Quezon City residents are classified as poor and impoverished, not even eating three times a day. Don’t tell me that they need to be drug addicts just to eat three times a day? And why feed only 2,500?

Let’s give Bautista the benefit of the doubt—he wants to feed 2,500 hungry drug dependents. Sure. This, however, shows his partiality or what some say as a “class act” or others would say “class legislation”. As vice mayor, you can’t do class legislation for it is violative of the equity principle in governance.

Jesus, in his time, fed thousands with just a loaf of bread and a bale of fish. Herbert Bautista fed 2,500 and spent a hundred million pesos doing it. The act of Jesus was a certified miracle. Bautista’s act was, by itself, a miracle of mathematics. You only have to compute it base on weeks and months.

Photo by Noemi Lardizabal-Dado. Some Rights Reserved.