by Diego Morra
The recent dismissal of the impeachment complaint filed by Koalisyong Makabayan and endorsed by the Makabayan Coalition does not speak well of the House of Representatives that complained about judicial overreach when the Supreme Court (SC), through the ponencia of Associate Justice Marvic “Honest Mistake” Leonen, set the strict process for the filing and evaluation of impeachment complaints and defined what a session day as merely a calendar day.
Leonen’s decision makes it harder for the Lower House to pass muster any impeachment complaint inasmuch as it requires the complainants to provide the respondents not only with copies of the allegations but also all the opportunities to contest all of them at the committee of justice and the plenary. What is truly galling at this early stage of the impeachment process is that the justice panel did not only evaluate the substance of the allegations but also passed judgment on the facticity of the proof adduced, particularly on the novel but completely corrupt formula for distributing pork barrel called BBM formula or “Baselined-Balanced-Managed” Parametric Formula.
If the members of the justice panel of the Lower House were assiduous enough, this BBM formula was crafted only in 2023, six months after the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was inaugurated. Why was this BBM formula devised at all when the better angels of SC’s nature decided that all forms of pork barrel should go, less than 100 years when the Americans introduced the practice in our benighted land. The BBM formula is not an innocuous distribution system of funds for infrastructure projects for all congressional districts since it is designed to allot funds to lawmakers of both chambers even as party-list legislators with no territorial districts managed to carve up the entire loot into huge slabs for their construction companies, or contractors who are their cronies, and firms owned by their relatives and nominees.
Koalisyong Makabayan’s impeachment complaint puts a big premium on the BBM formula as the concentrated expression of graft, much worse than the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) many moons ago that resigned Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin deemed in his ponencia as SC justice as unconstitutional and must be removed from the theory and practice of public administration. Unfortunately, Bersamin became the victim of the very evil he sought to excise on the basis of nasty accusations about his own office profiting from payoffs and looting of the public treasury. What comes around goes around, the American saying goes. Or the tiger cannot be expected to be vegetarian overnight. Koalisyong Makabayan was denied the opportunity to prove that implementing the BBM formula is an impeachable offense itself since it constitutes highway robbery. Or improper spending since it is impossible to distribute infra funds evenly since many districts do not even need such projects. By insisting on the implementation of the BBM scheme, the regime is not being systematic about what infra projects the country really needs.
This BBM formula could not have been designed to support what Koalisyong Makabayan says is a comprehensive infrastructure program for the entire country. In effect, this BBM formula is nothing but an “elegantized camouflage,” to borrow the phrase from the mathematician John Forbes Nash, who raised serious questions about the debates and lexicon of quantum mechanics with J. Robert Oppehnheimer. In the case of the BBM formula, the implicit rationale is “fairness” and “democratic” distribution of funds to make everybody happy. This is the very reason why the BBM formula is the grift that keeps on grifting.
Koalisyong Makabayan is essentially correct in positing that the BBM formula is not a mere mathematical construct but a scheme to make it appear that public funds are being used wisely, albeit “baselined,” “balanced, and “managed” to satisfy the country’s need to construct farm-to-market roads, and reduce the 68,000-km backlog, more bridges to link town and country, even expanded runways for airports to accommodate jets and top-of-the-line turboprops, control floods from the mountains to the plains, and perchance construct more classrooms inasmuch as resigned DepEd secretary Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio managed to build only 24 classroom buildings. With BBM as the initials, the formula for dangling more than P1.2 trillion in infra was meant to curry favor with Bongbong himself. Call it “The Hail to the Chief” formula. Under the scheme, a minimum of 3.8% of the total regional budget was “allocable” to infra projects. It is supposed to be balanced, or elastic, as budgets are adjusted on factors like poverty, climate vulnerability and the absorptive capacity of the district.
The cinch is in the letter “M,” which stands for “managed” inasmuch as the allocations are based on the “priorities of the leaders of the national government and the legislature.” Is a managed BBM formula consistent with the real infrastructure needs of the country? Or is it merely a method to dispense largesse and huge commissions for lawmakers and contractors alike? The House justice panel led by Batangas Rep. Gerville Luistro said the Koalisyong Makabayan impeachment complaint abided by required form but crashed out when the committee deliberated on its substance. Many of them found it sub par for the complaint to allege that the BBM formula was the responsibility of the president himself. In a country that is addicted to initials, acronyms and contrived monikers, the BBM thing was ruled to be the handiwork of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), specifically the now-deceased undersecretary Ma. Catalina “Kathy” Cabral, who might have been ordered by her superiors to create a BBM formula to jack up infrastructure spending. Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was glorified as the infrastructure king during his incumbency.
The son and namesake didn’t fall far from the tree. Rather, we are reminded of the quip by the great sculptor Constantin Brancusi, reacting to his mentor Auguste Rodin’s influence on him: “Nothing grows under the shade of a big tree.” So, BBM is now out of the shade of his father. Thus, the Brobdingnagian budget for infrastructure. The scheme might have been drawn up precisely to systematize the distribution of money to lawmakers, 80% of whom belong to political dynasties. As laid out by the DPWH, the BBM was crafted in 2023 to determine the allocation of infrastructure funds, often referred to as “allocables,” a euphemism for pork barrel, to congressional districts.
