Malaya (07/03.09)
“Before you get caught up by the mob mentality that got the Senator and pretender to the Presidency, immediately screaming graft and corruption, you should first examine all the facts.”
by Ducky Paredes
No, this piece is not about a new fad diet; rather, it is about another silly issue that one of our honorable and esteemed Senator has taken up – Department of Education (DepEd) using its noodles for something other than nutrition.
What the Senate investigation is doing is using a philosophical fallacy called “comparing apples and oranges,” which means that one gives equal weight to seemingly similar but are, in reality, completely different things,
For instance: if one bought a the Chinese cheapie car Chery for P1 million pesos, that would be absurdly expensive, but if you bought a 2009 BMW 7-series for the same price, it would be a steal.
So how does all of this relate to the DepEd’s allegedly “overpriced” noodles?
Asks Senator Mar Roxas, who could (if his Liberal Party gets lucky) become our next President, why is the DepEd buying noodles at P22, when I can buy this at the corner store for P5.00? Aha, there must be an overprice!
Of course the presidentiable would be right if the DepEd paid P22 for a 50-gram pack of noodles that only had flour and powdered egg as ingredients, needed to be cooked before it became edible, and did not include any delivery and handling fees; then yes, that’s expensive.
But what if what the DepEd bought was a 100-gram pack of special noodles, fortified with iron and other vitamins, enriched with fresh eggs and malunggay, packed in special food-grade material, did not need to be cooked in order to be eaten, and most importantly, included the delivery and handling fees to 376 school districts in 13 nutritionally-challenged provinces all over our 7,107 islands? What, then?
This is the same senator who has been promising us cheaper medicines four years running – a tradpol promise that may never be fulfilled
The senator might understand the disparate costs if one bought a food item from his family’s Gateway Mall for P8 and sent it to some starving child in Tawi-Tawi. What then would be the total cost?
Instead, his Senate Committee on Education and the Ombudsman ignores this and seems not to consider the additional ingredients in the DepEd package.
As for Kolonwel Trading Industries, the supposed “whistle-blower” of this whole overpricing incident? It is obvious to me that Kolonwel is a trading firm. How can one miss that when its name so boldly declares the nature of the firm? Thus, even if it had gotten a piece of that DepEd noodles contract, Kolonwel would not be manufacturing the product, Kolonwel would only have contacted a manufacturer and then added its “tongpats” to the item and collected this from DepEd. Besides, it never even bid on this contract. Kolonwell is a mere “middleman,” someone who, if one wants to get a bargain, one eliminates from the equation. Kolonwel lives off its connections with government. Its bids were also never on food items but for such as polyethylene plastic bags, 18-carat memento rings, playing cards and such.
In fact, a quick visit to the company’s website (www.kolonwel.com) states that the company is “actively engaged in the international distribution of gaming supplies and equipment to the Gaming Industry worldwide”, offering a “wide range of customizable products ranging from Casino Playing cards, slot machines, gaming table layouts and gaming chips and plaques to name a few.” Conspicuously absent from this list is noodles.
What happened was that Kolonwel came across bid documents for the DepEd noodle project. It then asked for an extension of the bidding deadline. Of course! After al, it needed extra time to find a supplier that could meet the special DepEd specs. When no extension of the bidding deadline was forthcoming, Kolonwel dropped out and did not submit a bid.
After the DepEd awarded the contract to Jeverps Manufacturing Corporation (a company whose core business is manufacturing noodles), Kolonwel raised a howl. Why? What was Kolonwel complaining about? Aside from the fact that it did not even submit a bid, it never categorically stated that it could manufacture and supply the noodles that conform to the exact specifications of the DepEd and at a price lower than that quoted by Jeverps. All it did was to cry “overprice” to media, and given the seemingly bloated price of P22 for what seems to be what one can buy at any sari-sari store, of course, it made the headlines. But, why would someone who wants to be President not have the sense to see the difference between the DepEd noodles and the Sari-sari store variety?
When the dispute finally reached the Senate (of course it reached our Senate, that involves itself even in private sexual matters), Kolonwel presented a highly suspect “certification” it supposedly obtained from testing agencies in Vietnam and Singapore, proving that the noodles Jeverps provided to the DepEd contained nothing but flour and egg powder.
But, Kolonwel missed one small yet important detail, which is that, since being awarded the contract; Jeverps had not produced a single pack of noodles for the DepEd. Not yet, anyway, on the day that the tests were done! So where in the world did Kolonwel get the noodles it had tested? Oops? !??
Certainly, these were not the DepEd noodles.
Before you get caught up by the mob mentality that got the Senator and pretender to the Presidency, immediately screaming graft and corruption, you should first examine all the facts.
You guessed it right, it’s simply a matter of putting your noodle working properly.
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“The naked truth is always better than the best dressed lie.” — Ann Landers
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hvp 07.02.09)
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