A recent report by our correspondent Ashley Manabat said the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) is losing up to 30 percent of its potential income from the small-town lottery (STL) because of the continued operation of jueteng and other forms of illegal gambling in some provinces.
The STL operation of the PCSO was supposed to take over jueteng, masiao, two-ball and other illegal numbers games in the country. The PCSO has expanded the list of STL operators during the Duterte administration to bring in more competition nationwide and in order for STL to live up to its original purpose as a jueteng and masiao killer.
But in a recent Senate hearing on the proposed creation of the Philippine Charity Office to replace the PCSO, STL operators complained that illegal gambling continues to flourish in their areas of operation, which prevents them from fully meeting their obligations to the government. About 30 percent of potential collections is lost to illegal gambling, according PCSO Chairman Jose Jorge Corpuz, a former police director.
The STL operator in Laguna, for instance, reported that it collects P4 million daily from STL but loses about P1.2 million to illegal gambling. Another STL operator in Albay is supposed to remit to the PCSO P2.5 million daily, and it was able to meet only 70 percent because it also lost to illegal gambling. The case was almost the same in the provinces of Batangas, Bulacan, Negros Occidental and Pangasinan.
President Duterte said he wanted to provide free medicines to indigent Filipinos by generating billions of pesos from STL operations and stamping out illegal numbers games, whose operators have been thriving despite efforts to stop them in the last few administrations. He even created a Task Force on Illegal Gambling for this purpose, headed by Justice Secretary Vitaliano N. Aguirre II, along with Executive Secretary Salvador C. Medialdea and Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III.
If the government has not been getting its target revenues from STL operations despite Duterte’s directive, it can only mean jueteng and other illegal numbers games still have police and local government protectors. Just in August, Philippine National Police (PNP) chief Ronald M. de la Rosa ordered the police to do everything to stop jueteng and other illegal numbers games within 15 days. What happened to this crackdown?
It does not help that a lot of people today still don’t seem to see anything inherently wrong with jueteng, masiao, two-ball or whatever else is their welcome diversion against the millstone of poverty and their hard daily existence. This, even after a president of the Republic was ousted mainly for taking bribes from jueteng. Administrations have come and gone, but jueteng is still around. It is hard to stop it because the people want it. They participate in it. It is already part of their culture.
But jueteng is not unstoppable. The President can always enforce his will. If he chooses to make it of paramount importance to stop jueteng, it can happen. If he wants jueteng operations to stop, it will stop. If he orders an all-out war against jueteng and the PNP complies with the same fervor they are exerting in the war against illegal drugs, it can be successful.
The government can reap enormous profits from operating STLs if all the other illegal numbers games are eliminated. STL retail revenues for the first semester this year are already at P6.17 billion, and the PCSO could have easily earned another P2 billion to P4 billion more without the competition from illegal numbers games. The government can do a lot of good with that money.
Let us also not forget that the issue here is the failure of the law and its implementation.
Jueteng is illegal because it is a racket. The draws are rigged and operators make money because they pick the “winning” number combinations.
Crooks and criminal clans run it because they are the only ones who know how to make a profit from it even after paying billions of pesos in bribes to their government protectors.