Urban poor group Kalipunan ng Damayang Mahihirap (Kadamay) dares Budget Secretary Florencio 'Butch' Abad and President BS Aquino into personally attending a forum in an urban poor community to defend themselves against corruption allegations on the Informal Settler Fund (ISF) and the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP).
The challenge is a reaction to a statement of Malacanang against a protest staged by student activists last Thursday who mobbed the Budget secretary after he attended a forum at the University of the Philippines Diliman to discuss the 2015 budget. Abad who was Aquino's campaign manager in the 2010 presidential election is said to be the main architect of the DAP. The Supreme Court declared DAP as partially unconstitutional in July.
"What would Mr. Aquino have to say when he learns that the urban poor are interested in engaging him and his budget secretary to a public forum so they can justfy why DAP is legal and why despite its promise to to boost the economy, DAP has failed to create enough employment to alleviate majority of the population from poverty?" asked Gloria Arellano, Kadamay national chairperson.
"We challenge him and Mr. Abad to personally explain to thousands of urban poor living in government's off-city relocation sites why despite the billions of pesos of the ISF, their lives in the relocation sites have only gone worse," Arellano added.
Kadamay has been staging protests recently at the head offices of the Commission on Audit and the National Housing Authority to ask for a full audit report of the ISF, a fund supposedly for the housing of urban poor especially those living in danger areas in Metro Manila.
The entire ISF is worth P50B with an annual disbursement of P10B until 2016. The Department of Budget and Management released in 2011 the first tranche of the ISF worth P11.05B under the controversial DAP.
Kadamay has alleged corruption of the ISF as the National Housing Authority to where the fund was disbursed to has been constructing off-city relocation sites contrary to the fund's description. According to a DBM's list of DAP-funded projects released in July, the P10B fund for settler along waterways and P450M fund for residents of North Triangle should be used to construct in-city housing.
"We firmly believe that the contracts entered into by the NHA with firms such as New san Jose Builders, Inc, who constructed the low-cost housing in Montalban (Rodriguez, Rizal) are corruption-ridden," expressed Arellano.
According to Kadamay, those who have possibly earned from these anomalous contracts include NHA top officials such as Aquino's Ateneo classmate NHA General Manager Chito Cruz, and Malacanang's Executive-Secretary Paquito Ochoa, who is a brother-in-law of businessman Jerry Acuzar, the owner of NSJBI.
More violent mob
"The urban poor have lots of questions to the President and his administration with regards to the ISF, for after all the fund bears our name. He should go down to the communities where his bosses are. If he can't to convince his bosses with his answers, Malacanang should not wonder why a listening audience would suddenly turn into a mob that is certainly more violent than the one staged by the UP students," said Arellano.
Kadamay said the protest staged by UP students is a clear manifestation of the growing anger of the Filipino people over the lack of decency, if not conscience, of the Aquino administration as it continues to defend the legality of DAP.
Protests has been following the President recently in some of his speaking engagements in different regions in the country and even abroad. Such protests will eventually snowball in the coming days in more parts of the country to demand for his immediate removal from the office, said Kadamay.
"If the poor are Mr. Aquino's real boss, they would have fired him long ago," Arellano added.
No comments:
Post a Comment