by Christine F. Herrera
Manila Standard Today
LAWMAKERS at Tuesday night’s budget hearing sang If We Hold on Together to remind Social Welfare Secretary Corazon Soliman how she led the Arroyo Cabinet in song as a sign of support for their chief executive, only to abandon her days later in 2005.
Soliman said she did not mind the humiliation.
“If this is what it takes so I can get the money, so be it,†she said after her budget came under attack for three hours by her former boss, now Pampanga Rep. Gloria Arroyo.
“Their motives for doing these to me is their lookout. I don’t mind as long as I get what is needed for the poorest of the poor. This is a flagship [project] of President Aquino.â€
But Arroyo demanded that Soliman’s P21.9-billion budget for the conditional cash transfer program—a dole to the poorest of the poor—be redistributed to the agencies that lost funding in the 2011 spending plan.
The former President said it took her administration three years to establish the program for 1 million beneficiaries, and warned that the “undue haste†with which Soliman was pushing its expansion to 2.3 million recipients receiving P1,400 a month guaranteed failure.
“I am not against increasing the CCT beneficiaries. I started [the program], but a sudden and massive increase by more than double seems both ambitious and untimely,†Arroyo said.
Soliman, who stood beside the sponsor of the Social Welfare budget, Guimaras Rep. Joaquin Carlos Rahman Nava, said the program would add 300,000 beneficiaries every quarter starting January 2011.
The session was suspended several times to allow Nava, who was fielding the questions, to confer with Soliman.
At every suspension, lawmakers from the Liberal Party and Lakas-Kampi sang the 1991 song that Soliman had made famous again in 2005.
Arroyo’s dissection of Soliman’s budget took three hours, starting at 8:54 p.m. and ending at 11:47 p.m.
The longest suspension lasted more than an hour so Soliman could answer a question about the qualifications of the 1,760 people who would be hired to carry out the program.
Arroyo also questioned the P1.6 billion set aside for new staff, and appeared annoyed when Nava could not provide details on the program.
“It is irresponsible to allocate a budget for a program that is not yet fully prepared,†Arroyo said.
“The details may look very nice, but I’ve been there Mr. Speaker, the implementation is certainly not that simple.â€
Arroyo also criticized the lump-sum funds in the 2011 national budget, including the P12 billion set aside for “basic educational facilities†under the Education Department without itemizing how many classrooms or children would benefit from the expense.
The Pampanga congresswoman also criticized the cuts in the National Food Authority’s P8-billion budget for rice procurement, the zero budgeting for state colleges and universities, and the 50- percent reduction in the Judiciary’s requested spending plan.
All these should be restored from funds taken from the Social Welfare Department, she said.
Nava said that of the P21.9-billion budget for the conditional cash transfer program, only P17 billion would actually be distributed to the poor families.
More than P3 billion had been set aside for operational expenses, including the P1.6 billion for training the 1,891 field, regional and central office personnel who would be hired to carry out the program.
Arroyo said that in her time, the department spent a year to recruit personnel before the program was rolled out in 2008.
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