WHAT could you buy with P300,000?
If you wanted to spend it on education, you could buy six to eight entry-level laptops for teachers. Or you could buy 250 to 300 heavy-duty plastic or wooden armchairs. It would also be enough for 1,500 to 1,800 reams of A4 bond paper.
On the other hand, the same amount could go some way to helping law enforcement, buying 10 to 12 bulletproof vests, or six to eight 9-millimeter pistols, or 15 to 20 high-definition, law-enforcement grade body cameras with docking stations.
In the field of health care, the sum could buy you 150,000 to 200,000 capsules of generic Amoxicillin or 1,500 to 2,000 vials of anti-venom or specialized vaccines. Or you could buy 15 to 20 professional-grade nebulizers or two to three manual-crank hospital beds.
For daily office work, P300,000 can get you about 60 to 80 sets of original laser printer toner cartridges, or about 50 units of 2TB external hard drives for data backup.
In social services, the money could buy you 600 to 750 family food packs that are designed to feed a family of five for two days.
What you really would “not” want to do is to use it to feed a craven senator who has not attended a single Senate session since November 2025 — four months and running now — because he’s afraid he’ll be arrested for what he did when he was chief of police and carried out the Duterte administration’s bloody war on drugs, which killed thousands of drug suspects without the benefit of a trial.
Yet, we as taxpayers continue to pay about P300,000 a month for Sen. Ronald Dela Rosa, which he continues to draw whether he works or not. This is money that the absent senator spends while hiding out in Davao, maybe on bodyguards, maybe on CCTV systems, or maybe on disguises so he can elude law enforcement agents, if they ever come for him.
The sad truth is, the International Criminal Court, which arrested his boss, former president Rodrigo Duterte, has yet to issue a warrant for Dela Rosa’s arrest. That has not stopped him from shirking his responsibility and cowering in the South.
His colleagues in the Senate, meanwhile, seem perfectly happy to let this unjust situation fester. File an ethics complaint, the Senate president said when asked why the public must keep paying for a senator who has not shown up for work for four months and counting. Well, somebody finally did, on Feb. 25. The civil society group that filed the complaint accused the senator of dereliction of duty due to his prolonged absence from the Senate.
But the case against him is stuck in procedural limbo, and Sen. JV Ejercito, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Ethics and Privileges, says the complaint faces “outright dismissal” because Senate rules do not include a “no work, no pay” provision or specific penalties for long-term physical absenteeism. Trust the Senate to choose technicality over justice.
Dela Rosa has not attended a plenary session and has been incommunicado since Nov. 10, 2025. So, by our reckoning, that’s P1.2 million gone to a nonperforming asset. That’s P1.2 million that could have gone to laptops for teachers, bulletproof vests for police officers, or medicine and food packs for the poor.
A public servant with a shred of conscience would have donated his unearned salary by now. But if Dela Rosa could sleep soundly while presiding over the death of thousands of suspects in Duterte’s bloody war on drugs, pocketing the people’s money and shortchanging the public should be nothing to him.
