WITHIN six months after he took his oath in June 2010 as the country’s 15th Vice President, Jejomar ‘Jojo’ C. Binay, had two wishes fulfilled, with a lot of help from President Benigno Simeon C. Aquino III and his friends in Congress. First, Aquino granted Binay’s request to set up official residence and workplace at the newly renovated Coconut Palace in Manila, a 2.7-hectare “Imeldific” complex built in 1978 supposedly for P1.2-billion.

IN THE last 23 months, a total of P5.78 billion of taxpayers’ money went to pork – or officially, the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) – to finance the pet projects across the nation of 21 senators of the republic. Two others, Panfilo M. Lacson and Joker P. Arroyo, have opted not to get any pork servings at all for years now.

AUCTIONS for civil-works contractors to carry out “hard” or infrastructure-related pork-barrel projects must be lonely affairs. There is only one bidder for each of the competitive tenders held by the Department of Public Works and Highways to choose a contractor for infrastructure projects under the PDAF program, according to DPWH data on abstract of bids since July 2010.

THE OFFICIAL name of the pork barrel – Priority Development Assistance Fund or PDAF – should already make it obvious what it is truly intended for. Yet instead of primarily being a means of helping more people gain access to basic services that the government should have provided them in the first place, PDAF remains a political tool wielded by those in the legislature and the executive to serve their own interests.