A gift delayed at birth

Congress passed the Expanded Centenarians Act promising elderly Filipinos a small, dignified acknowledgment – PHP 10,000 at 80, 85, 90, or 95, and PHP 100,000 at 100.

President Marcos signed it on Feb. 26, 2024, and it took effect just three weeks later to widespread applause.

Then, by the National Commission for Senior Citizens’ own account, the money to pay for it did not move for roughly a year.

This is another infuriating case of the government writing a check with no clear directions for cashing.

The immediate instinct is to blame the Department of Budget and Management for sitting on the release.

The alternative is to point fingers at NCSC-Western Visayas, an office currently drowning in a 2024 and 2025 backlog. They are attempting to serve 133 local government units with exactly 16 employees – the heaviest LGU load of any NCSC region.

Both explanations hold water, but neither is sufficient.

What should embarrass every national lawmaker who voted for this law and walked away is the DBM’s own February 2024 order. That mandate approved new NCSC regional offices with 96 plantilla positions for all eight new regions combined, not for Iloilo alone.

Western Visayas was never promised the staffing it desperately needs to process these payouts. The regional office is short-handed by design, not by attrition.

Manila simply split an already thin number eight ways and had the audacity to call it capacity-building.

What we can settle locally are the numbers from NCSC-Western Visayas.

The office claims 14,555 grantees and PHP 216.37 million disbursed, yet a sum of their reported age brackets actually lands 255 people short.

An office that cannot reconcile its own tally is an office asked to do massive accounting work with a headcount built for something far smaller.

This systemic failure is not unique to Iloilo.

The NCSC says it disbursed PHP 2.8 billion nationwide in 2025 alone, yet eight octogenarians in Quezon City still had to file anti-red-tape complaints this past August.

Malacañang had to step in and order the commission to move within 48 hours.

That alone is proof this is a national bottleneck wearing a regional name, four hundred kilometers north of here.

Instead of fixing that backend chaos, the central office pushes ATM cards and e-wallets, pretending 90-year-olds in rural Panay can simply download an app to get paid.

Fixing this mess costs something real. Congress could require future entitlement laws to carry a hard funding-release deadline, rather than just an effectivity date.

But that forces the DBM to front-load disbursements it currently sequences against other priorities, meaning some other agency’s supplemental request waits much longer.

The NCSC can also ask for plantilla positions beyond the initial 96.

But that creates a permanent payroll line rather than a one-time appropriation, and whichever Congress approves it owns that staggering cost for every fiscal year after.

Politicians avoid those hard fiscal choices, opting instead for easy headlines before handing the logistical nightmare down to the regions.

The state promised a gift to our elders, but handed them a waiting game they literally do not have time to win.