By Leonardo Micua

INQUIRER.net reported on Friday (before our deadline) that the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee chaired by Senator Francis Tolentino has recommended the filing of criminal charges against at least eight former and current officials of the Department of Education and of the Procurement Service of the Department of Budget and Management who allegedly conspired to purchase 39,583 ‘pricey and outdated’ laptops amounting to about P2.4 billion at the height of the pandemic.

From where we sit, we view this to be no different from what Mayor Belen Fernandez reported to the first meeting for the new year of Local Development Council, that there were 1,242 units of 2-in-1 tablet PCs purchased by the past Dagupan City administration for P34,361,172 (@ P27,666.00 per) although the unit cost per tablet PC at the time of the purchase was only P20,995, or an overprice of P6,777.00 per unit.

Worse, the tablet PCs were already outdated and “not useful because these did not meet the requirements of the intended users (students and their teachers) “who  at that time were painstakingly undergoing online classes because of the pandemic.

Worst, When the units were delivered to the DepEd Dagupan in reportedly “sealed and unopened boxes”,  24 boxes were found empty! DepEd Dagupan, that received the delivered boxes, may not have exercised due diligence in conducting physical inventory of the delivered items because they trusted the city officials who were generously providing  the gadgets.

Mayor Belen is right to direct City  Legal Officer Aurora Valle to exert efforts to recover the 24 missing tablet PCs from either the supplier HIDETECH Corporation,  based in Mandaluyong City or from other persons who had planned on keeping these.

But more than this, Belen should file the cases and other anomalous transactions entered into, and questionable projects undertaken by the previous administration before the Ombudsman.

Yes, Belen should charge the vultures who bled the coffers of the city, dry.

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It is about time our onion farmers from Bayambang and Bautista get a better deal from the national government, particularly from the Department of Agriculture. 

As the biggest producers of onions in Pangasinan, they should be accorded better respect by DA by allotting one of the six cold storage plants it intends to build in the next few months.

It will be tragic for out farmers and to be left out again in the distribution of these cold storage facilities where they can safely store some of their products when there is an oversupply of onion in the market.

For this, the Sangguniang Panlalawigan must pass a resolution asking DA to allocate one such cold storage plant in  Bayambang if it is not too late in the day, and for Gov. Mon Mon to use his clout and influence with President BBM to have this project installed in his province, asap!

We did not hear anything from the SP nor from the governor when the DA was still  planning to import onion in a bid to stabilize the price of the commodity when a kilo of onion went up to P600, while harvesting of onion was already starting in Bayambang. Our local growers did not get any support.

For sure once the imported onion reach the markets, the price of onion will shrink to the barest minimum to the consternation of farmer producers who invested so much in planting this product months back. 

The deafening silence of the SP in the matter of importation of onion and on other things that concerns onion growers could mean one thing— that the provincial government does not care if the farmers are getting their rightful share from their own hard work and investments. 

If Pangasinan will not get the cold storage facility planned by DA, we will know who to blame.

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Happy New Year to all my Chinese friends. You know, I have plenty of Chinese friends here in Dagupan, Pangasinan and other parts of the country, and even in Singapore whom I  met in Malaysia some time ago when I was still reporting for PNA.

They are so nice, jovial, friendly and true.

Among them are Mayor Belen and her siblings and some of their friends. By the way, thanks to Mayor Belen and VM BK Kua for sending me a special tikoy through my daughter-in-law Paula on the occasion of Chinese New Year.

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