how the government works...

Public Office is public trust. It is all about public service. People fight their way to get elected in order to serve the common good of the public, ideally. Providing services to the people is one of the major roles of our government. The welfare of the public should be the foremost consideration of our public officials.

Information and communication technology is a much needed tool in the government today. The government’s undertaking of the National Broadband Network (NBN) project aims to create seamless connectivity among all national and local government agencies. Such will enhance the delivery of services to the people as it will cut down the time required in accommodating the needs of the public, lowering the expenses for travel, communications, and red tape and providing for interconnectivity between the different agencies who work hand in hand to look provide the public what it needs. (http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2007/june/10/yehey/top_stories/20070610top4.html)
The NBN project seems to answer the growing need of the government to adopt a more “updated and connected” information and communications technology. This would definitely enhance the government's ability to render services and would also make them more efficient. However, the problem arises with the inception of the project. Now kicks in graft and corruption.
The BOT is the more advantageous scheme to undertake in the NBN project rather than the project-loan scheme. This way, private sector would carry on the cost of the construction of the infrastructure & the network. However, since the public servants involved wants a higher cut, they preferred the loan arrangement. As Jun Lozada admitted in his statement, the officials get a cut in almost every project they undertake. The problem with this one is that the commission asked is way too high that it could finance a separate project all together. This is how government procurement works. Officials look at every chance they can get to serve their own self interest. And the way that corruption works in our country, even if they already get a big commission, they still manage to squeeze from the actual project itself, thus reducing the quality of the proposed project. We, the tax payers take in the blow with the poor quality of government services while we continually pay off our country’s debt. The public officers should learn the meaning of public trust & public service. They should also know that the opposite of public interest is self interest.

I actually found it funny that Sen. Santaigo tested the credibility of the witness by citing his own corruption problems. Lozada candidly answered this question and I guess Sen. Santiago was stunned. He didn’t deny any misdealings he had in the past. The goal of Sen. Santiago was to discredit him as a witness by painting him as a corrupt person himself. Thinking about it, everyone in that room got their share from one or more government projects. In reality, all our public officers got something from the people. As long as he’s not gonna pull a chavit, I probably can take his word for it in order to catch the “bigger fish”.