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TAXPAYERS will cough up some P2.066 billion in interest
and principal payments this year for loans used to
implement 17 telecommunications projects including rural
telephones without dial tones.
And this
according to Nationalist People’s Coalition (NPC) Rep.
Abraham Mitra of Palawan will “hound and haunt Filipinos
yet unborn, who will pay for these, as wo of the loans
will be finally paid in 2025.
However,
Mitra said that despite this huge payment, P12.3 billion
of the debt will remain outstanding at the end of the
year.
Next
year, the debt service for the loans will dip a little
to P2.005 billion, he said.
Mitra
said the loans were taken out by every administration
after former-President Ferdinand Marcos but he stopped
short of imputing ill motive on the four administrations
since 1986 for borrowing money for unsustainable
telecommunications project.
“It
could be due to rapid technological advances wherein a
new technology has a shorter shelf life because it is
made obsolete as soon as it is unveiled,” he said.
Mitra
clarified that the P12.3 billion in loans that will
remain outstanding at the end of this year “cover the
principal only, so if interest were included the amount
to be paid will be much bigger.”
Interest
rates range from 1.4 percent per annum to the
8.1-percent add-on per year which a Canadian agency
charges, he said.
The
burden of interest charges is shown in next year’s
repayment schedule for these loans.
“The
cost of servicing the 17 loans in 2008 will reach P2.005
billion, of which close to P400 million will be in
interest payments,” said Mitra, who adopted the
government’s P46 to a US dollar forecast exchange rate
in making the computation.
“The
flip side is that while we know how much is yet to be
paid, we do not know how much had been paid. If the
future obligations are equal to past payments then the
sum is staggering, for it would be in the neighborhood
of P25 billion, he added.
“We are
paying steep bills for telephones that do not work. Some
of these telephones have not even sent the word
‘Hello,’” Mitra said.
As an
example, he said that in Salug, Zamboanga del Norte,
local officials have called the telephones installed in
the town “a souvenir, a display, an orange elephant”
after the orange color of the calling apparatus.
Another,
he said, is a report quoting town mayor Jesus Lim as
complaining that residents have no use for the 92
telephone booths installed in the town’s 22 barangays.
Mitra
said the Salug telephone project is covered by the
Canadian-funded “Telepono sa Barangay” (TsB)
project implemented by the Department of Transportation
and Communications.
Mitra
said that as shown in the web site of the Commission on
Information and Communications Technology (CICT), the
Export Development Corp. of Canada (EDC) funded the two
TsB projects. |
