MANILA (Mindanao Examiner / Aug. 24, 2013) – The Progressive Organization of Gays in the Philippines or ProGay has joined the mounting call for the total abolition of the pork barrel given to lawmakers.
The group also criticized President Benigno Aquino for taking control over the congressional pork barrel and that he intends to hide earmarks inside the National Budget itself to escape auditing. This, after Aquino ordered the abolition of the scandal-plagued Priority Development Assistance Fund and only to propose new pork barrel syste.
ProGay demanded an authentic and total deletion of all pork barrels including much larger discretionary sums controlled by Aquino and pressed its own calls for health-oriented budget reform.
“All that drama about abolition is just a big big chika! PDAF has become the President’s huge personal piggy bank, and the public was right in calling it Benigno Aquino Development Assistance Fund or BADAF,” said Clyde Pumihic, spokesperson for ProGay, in a statement sent to the regional newspaper Mindanao Examiner.
Netizens had a field day making BADAF go viral hours after the President’s speech on the abolitio of the lawmakers’ pork barrel.
“The Philippines has a rising HIV crisis where one person gets infected every two hours, yet the allocation for prevention and treatment is so paltry, just a mere P120 million of the national budget. We are so scandalized to learn that 10 billion pesos have been squandered by corruption, and that one trillion pesos more is controlled by the President for purposes that is so hard to monitor and audit,” Pumihic said.
He said Congress is deaf and blind to widespread demands to fund the conservative estimated P2.2 billion annual shortfall – the amount needed to provide adequate anti-retroviral drugs to the existing populations living with HIV, clean up the blood supply, hire aid workers, and provide most at-risk groups with preventive education.
“The reported pork barrel take of 10 billion siphoned off by political dynasties and scammers could have funded five years of anti-HIV efforts. We demand the government to scrap the Priority Development Assistance Fund, allot the necessary funds for comprehensive health care, and force these plunderers to return all the money they stole,” Pumihic said.
ProGay also pushed the government to halt its ongoing privatization programs to sell off 26 government hospitals and force many other public health facilities to remove free health care for indigents. The gay rights alliance said this move makes diagnostics for sexually transmitted infections acutely unaffordable among young and unemployed transgenders and gay men, which further fuels explosive rates of transmission among vulnerable groups.
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