AS THE saying goes, “You get what you pay.”
Add to that the idiom “If you give peanuts, you get monkeys.”
That should be our attitude towards democracy. If we do not make it work, it will not work. And no one else could make it work, except the people who are supposed to benefit from it.
To put it another way, democracy is not like a vending machine that will give us something of value if we put some coins into it.
As I remember from my basic political science courses, democracy is a social contract wherein the contractors, meaning the citizens, are supposed to make good on their obligations, and part of that is the duty not only to obey the laws, but also to participate in the democratic process.
Assuming that all good citizens are paying their taxes, they are already paying something to the government, and therefore they should get some good values, because they are not just paying peanuts.
Aside from the officially elected councils at the barangay, municipal and provincial levels, there are officially mandated consultative councils at these same levels, otherwise known as Local Development Councils (LDCs).
According to the Local Government Code (LGC), all sectors in these localities are supposed to be represented in these consultative councils, by way of sectoral organizations that are accredited by the Local Government Units (LGUs) as legitimate Non-Government Organizations (NGOs).
Although these LDCs are just supposed to be consultative in nature, there is a legal basis for their proposals and advocacies to be considered by the LGUs in the passing of local ordinances and in the implementation of policies, programs and projects. As I see it from the perspective of basic political science, these LDCs may not have the political power, but they are supposed to have the political influence, because the LGC has provided the means for them to assert their influence.
Aside from the Internal Revenue Allocations (IRAs) that the LGUs are getting from the national government, there is another source of money that is supposed to go to the funding of local projects, and that is no other than the Countryside Development Fund (CDF), also known as the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), also known as the pork barrels. The problem is, the pork barrels are not released to the LGUs, because these are released instead through the district congressmen who are elected from these same local constituencies.
According to the legal fiction that seems to be also perpetuated by conventional wisdom, these district congressmen are supposed to have the capability to “see” what the Congress itself could not “see”, in terms of identifying the local concerns that would need priority development assistance. By comparison however, it would be reasonable to say that the LDCs would be in a better position to “see” what these local concerns are, within an objective consultative context, and not through a subjective intuitive context as “seen” by one person acting alone.
At the national level, there is supposed to be a Medium Term Philippine Development Plan (MTPDP). As stipulated in the LGC, each LGU in all levels is supposed to have their own Medium Term Local Development Plans (MTLDPs), plans that they are supposed to prepare with the full participation of all local sectors that are supposed to be fully represented in their own LGCs. It goes without saying that these local development plans are supposed to be the legal basis for utilizing the funds from the IRAs, in addition to their own local revenue sources.
Even if there is no clear stipulation in the LGC that the pork barrels should be included in the pool of funds that would be used for implementing the MTLDPs, there is no prohibition against doing that either. Although they are called by different names, both the IRA s and the CDFs come from the same sources and these are the citizens who are supposed to benefit from these monies. Now that there are a lot of issues about how are pork barrels are being used, it would be reasonable to think that the district congressmen who would want to be above board should just voluntarily turn over their CDFs to their local LDCs.
As I understand it, these MTLDPs are supposed to be based on Land Use Plans (LUPs) that are in turn supposed to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Years ago, GIS technology was rocket science that most LGUs could hardly afford. Nowadays however, GIS is very affordable, such that even the barangay governments could already afford it. Sadly however, many LGUs do not have their own LUPs, much less their own GIS systems. If anyone knows of any LGU that would like to have their own LUPs and GIS systems, please let me know.
In these modern times when even the most trivial events are posted on Facebook, Twitter and You Tube, it would not be too difficult perhaps for local citizens to get involved in their own governance, by simply using these online social networking sites. Aside from that, almost everyone now has a camera that could be used to take pictures of anything that could be reported on these social sites, and that could include pictures of local development needs that neither the Congress nor the district congressmen could “see”./PN
