weak dollar coupled with a strong Peso has created a bonanza for the Arroyo Government. With its foreign reserves aflush, it has been paying off much of its foreign debt; a strategy that will benefit future generations of Filipinos who will no longer have to live out their lives under the crushing burden of foreign debt. One of those debts that has been finally paid off is the Bataan Nuclear Processing Plant or BNPP.

The BNPP saga started almost 32 years ago during the Marcos Era, a time when Ferdinand and his wife Imelda, were cleaning-out the national treasury while singing "Dahil Sa Iyo" in front of the cameras.  In a rigged bidding process, US conglomerate Westinghouse won the contract to build the plant for $500 million. A rumored commission of $80 million was paid by Westinghouse to Marcos lackey Herminio Desini who went on a European real estate buying spree soon thereafter.

Cost overruns quickly escalated the price of the plant to a final total $2.3 billion! Now, with the debt finally settled in April, 2007, it has cost the Filipino people a total of Php21.2 billion Pesos!

And what you ask did Juan Dela Cruz get for all that money? Nothing! Absolutely, nothing--nada! Not a single Watt of electricity has been generated by this boondoggle of a white elephant!

The principal characters are slowly fading into obscurity: Ferdinand Marcos is long dead, his body wasting away in a refrigerated crypt; Imelda, his intellectually-challenged wife has managed to stay out of jail, and is getting up there in years; Herminio Desini--"Mr. High Commission(er)," has never been brought to task or made to answer for his part in this disastrous deal.

And so we move on. As day laborers in the Manila make do with a paltry wage of Php200 pesos a day (about $4.30), we must look ourselves in the mirror and accept part of the responsibility--part of the blame, for the BNPP fiasco. Maybe we could have been more vocal; maybe we should have demanded more from our leaders; maybe we should have stood-up to the foreign lenders who must have known what was going on. But we didn't! Let us hope that we all have, at the very least, learned our lesson. A very painful and expensive lesson indeed.