‘Inside the Senate, they’re all alike’ (2)

Dear Mr. Bondoc,

To continue, I left my miserable life with that senator after x months, and went into business. Years later a friend invited me to do secretarial, eventually field, work for a senatorial candidate, now also deceased. He won and I was absorbed into his staff. I was back at the Senate.

My new boss was a brilliant and very kind person. To employees he gave financial assistance even from his own pocket, and told us never to turn down any constituent. He’d share with us his own food in the middle of a tiring day or during overtime work. He gave us bonuses aside from what we get from operations savings, brought us presents from his travels.

I felt I had found the ideal boss. But our chief of staff was the exact opposite. She made money on our monthly budgets. She collected receipts even from our personal expenses, have these certified as official business, then pocket the reimbursements. She had ghost employees in the payroll. Every senator had a monthly budget of P1 million for staff salaries, office supplies, office rentals, furniture, plane fare, newspaper subscriptions, etc. The chiefs of staff, usually the son or daughter of the senators, made it a habit to use it all up, so that they don’t have to return the monthly savings. That’s where all the ineligible receipts were used.

Also, our enterprising project officer took a cut from all the projects. She even had the gall to write the district engineers and regional directors (of the Dept. of Public Works and Highways) to endorse her preferred contractors and suppliers. She made money, 50-percent kickbacks, on mahogany seeds from the Dept. of Agriculture, children’s coloring books, barangay seminars, infrastructure projects and livelihood training (cattle raising). She was able to hide her dealings from our boss, but not from me. She underestimated her co-workers and left paper trails of her shenanigans everywhere. Eventually she got caught and was fired.

When the boss died, I decided to change careers. I got married and settled down — until another friend gave me "consultancy" work with different senators. Trained by my first boss to deal with government officials, I became friends with Cabinet secretaries, undersecretaries, assistants and bureau directors. That gave me lots of "jobs".

I was doing work simultaneously for four senators (short description of each). I prepared and submitted proposals, followed them up with the agencies concerned, did PR. Sometimes from my own allowance I’d buy fruits, noodles or cakes for my contacts to speed up the paperwork. I got to meet my employers’ favorite contractors/suppliers. Every time we get the SAROs (special allotment release orders), they’d all be waiting at the senators’ offices or at the (name of nearby hotel). And they’d give boxes carefully gift-wrapped. I always wondered why, since it’s not the senators’ birthdays. So naive of me, I later learned it was money in exchange for big projects, ha-ha-ha.

In fairness to my honorable employers, it was always a son or daughter, sometimes a cousin, who would actually receive the money. Still, like I said, outwardly they’re clean, but inside the Senate they’re all alike and dirty.

I would also like to share with you that sometimes, rather, a lot of times, I encountered two or three contractors on one and the same project. It turned out that the children of the senator from (a Luzon province), now deceased, were competing with each other in bagging the big-funded projects. An acquaintance, Mrs. L from Cagayan Valley, once confided to me that she gave a cash advance of half a million pesos to that legislator’s daughter, now active in (name of an anti-Charter Change group) sometime in 1998. But she wasn’t given a single project; she was given only promises. I heard that their property was foreclosed by the bank and eventually went bankrupt.

Another friend, from a big construction company (name of the firm), also gave an advance to this same lady. Again, no projects.

The three siblings were always nag-uunahan (racing each other) to the point that they’d have their father sign documents, and then they’d hurry over to the DBM (Dept. of Budget and Management) with their lists. When one time I was asked by one daughter in the staff to follow up some papers at the DBM. It turned out that the son, or was it the other sibling, had arrived there earlier and got the SARO. I was so embarrassed because I used the name of the daughter. Nakakahiya sila (they are shameful), they didn’t coordinate among themselves.

Next I’ll tell you about more suppliers.

Respectfully,
Jason

(To be continued)

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