Government has much money for free tuition

Batas Mauricio/

THE way Sen. Loren Legarda is talking about where to find the funds to assure free education in state universities and colleges makes one think that it is a difficult task looking for money to support poor students under the free tuition scheme. The truth is that, there is so much money in government not only for free college education, but other ventures to help the people as well.

First, Legarda must look at the funds given as “miscellaneous and other operating expenses” (or MOOEs) to many officials and agencies of the government. She should start looking at the MOOEs of senators and congressmen, and I am certain she would find that many of these funds given to lawmakers are simply too much. Sobra-sobra, as we Tagalogs will say it.

Cutting down these MOOEs by only as much as 20 percent a year will already yield hundreds of millions of pesos, or billions if the truth be told, that could be channeled to pay for the free college and university education of poor Filipino youth.

Then, Legarda must also inquire into the intelligence funds being given yearly to many government officials and their offices, starting from the Office of the President down to the police and the military establishments.

Again, I am of the perception that cutting down intelligence funds doled annually in the yearly budgets of government could tremendously add to the money for free college education.

Then, the perception is that many of these disbursements of government funds as intelligence funds do not serve any purpose at all, considering the series of attacks, both by communist rebels and Muslim rebels, which appear to have been undetected by the police and the military notwithstanding their hefty intelligence funds.

Third, some serious efforts must be employed, at this point in time, to reduce corruption in government. When I ran for the Senate in 2004 under the Aksiyon Demokratiko Party of the late Sen. Raul Roco, our team was told that corruption in government was already estimated by World Bank experts to be at 40 percent of the entire government budget.

Assuming that this corruption level of 40 percent of the annual government budget persists up to now where the 2017 budget is about P1 trillion, some P400 billion of this budget goes to corruption on a yearly level. If we can reduce this even to just only 20 percent, then we can devote some P200 billion to free college education.

As I have been saying in this column, there are many ways of skinning a cat. The only thing needed for our leaders, like Legarda, is creativity, ingenuity, and, yes, the capacity to think clearly for the greater interest of our people. Unfortunately, this would appear to be too much for the asking for many of them.

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Parents, guardians, and any other person whose job or concern is to take care and assure the safety of children and other minors, this is not meant to scare or frighten you but on Aug. 2, 2017, the truth and reality of syndicates snatching, kidnapping, and taking away kids for a host of reasons jolted me like I was hit with several bolts of lightning.

One of the lady preachers of the Anak ng Diyos Kadugo ni Kristo Church told me and the other preachers and deacons of the KNK who were gathered for their regular Wednesday Bible immersion and administrative deliberations while she was profusely crying, that one of her grandsons had become the latest victim of kidnapping.

The lady preacher said the incident happened at a squatter colony as her grandson walked home from school at about 1 pm. The mother of the grandson, one of the preacher’s daughters, was with the child and two other kids of hers who were also going home when, literally, at the batting of her eyelashes, the grandson was gone.

Frantically, the mother of the child who vanished from her sight tried to look around her, searching for the child, her eldest. But he was nowhere in sight–as if he vanished into thin air. As panic began to engulf her, the mother literally dragged her two other very young children with her as she went hither and thither, and even in circles, searching for him.

When the missing child could not be located even after almost an hour of searching, the mother rushed to the nearest police station and reported the apparent kidnapping of her son. Policemen then were dispatched to join the search. Unfortunately, as the afternoon descended into dusk, their efforts yielded no sign of the child.

As daylight started to give way to the enveloping darkness of the night, the mother found herself retracing her steps back to the school of her missing son. She dreaded going home to their shanty, where the wake of her husband who died last year was held, without their child.

But as she sat on the side of the road, she caught sight of her son, stripped of his school uniform–polo and shorts–and was only in his underwear, looking dazed, and gravely afraid. She rushed to the son and tried to hug him. At first, the son coiled away from her, perhaps unable to recognize her with his troubled mind.

But as recognition came back to the child he embraced his mother in a tight grip, crying. The mother tried to talk to him, asking him questions, but the boy kept quiet all the time. Even today, the lady preacher said the kidnapped boy doesn’t want to talk at all. He has refused going out, even to go to his school, indicating that he is still suffering from deep psychological turmoil, which may take a long time to heal.

Indeed, this experience of the grandson of the lady preacher confirmed, beyond reasonable doubt, that there are people out there, whether organized or not, who are engaged in snatching away or kidnapping of children, mostly to take their internal organs so they could be sold to rich patrons. Since no one in government appears capable of stopping this, parents and elders can only rely on God to take care of their children.

E-mail: batasmauricio@yahoo.com