By NESTOR MATA
‘He has nothing to offer than the usual bromides about how his anti-corruption campaign is progressing after just two years in power.’
PRESIDENT Noynoy Aquino’s anti-corruption campaign, his political critics say, is starting to reveal the exact opposite of its goal to curb, if not eradicate, corruption in government.
After just two years in office, he still has nothing more to offer than the usual bromides about how his drive has progressed with the filing of corruption charges, which are still unproven to this day, against his predecessor Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and the ouster of Chief Justice Renato C. Corona for an unimpeachable offense, and not even for undeclared hidden wealth.
One of the many reasons cited by his critics is that Aquino himself knows what corrupt practices are as shown by his constitutionally questionable ways in going after those he claims are guilty of graft and corruption, making his campaign clearly bogus!
Nobody can win the war against corruption that way. It is a war that’s “… older than the than the oldest Filipino alive today,” according to a very interesting study by the Transparency International (Phil.) and the Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG). “It was one of the cancers that Jose Rizal sought to lay bare before the temple in his novel Noli Me Tangere. Most attempts to build on the literary tradition that Rizal started would always feature corruption as among the main ills of Philippine society.”
The study recalled that “in 1986 the Filipino people through a popular uprising ousted Ferdinand Marcos who ruled for almost two decades, (and) those who came after him would invariably be at the receiving end of corruption charges. Corazon Aquino had her “Kamag-anak Incorporated” and Fidel V. Ramos would be known for signing onerous contracts left and right. Joseph Estrada would himself be ousted in 2001 in another popular uprising, largely against corruption, and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who replaced Estrada on the heels of the 2001 uprising, would herself be linked to no less than ten major corruption scandals. (And now, to update the recent history of corruption in government, President Noynoy Aquino has transformed his mother Cory’s “Kamag-anak, Incorporated” into what is now called in derision as “K.K.K.” or “Kamag-anak, Kaklase, Kabarilan, Incorporated”!)
Indeed, as noted by the study, “Corruption remains a festering cancer in Philippine society. In fact, over the passage of time, we would find corruption worsening rather than lessening. In the most recent surveys by international institutions, the Philippines has invariably emerged as among the most corrupt countries in the world.
“For traditional politicians, corruption is a permanent fixture of politics and governance that is addressed simply by new mechanisms, new laws, and improved public image of government officials and agencies.
“For the most part, ordinary people are easily agitated when someone in authority uses his or her position to get rich at other people’s expense. They consider it unconscionable that a public official flaunts his/her ill-gotten wealth while the majority of people wallow in poverty, social services are neglected and development projects are put on hold.
“Other lobby groups look at corruption as a problem of governance. Notably, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) propagate this notion that corruption flourishes due to the lack of mechanisms for transparency and accountability in the running of governments.
“Still others abhor corruption on moral, political and economic grounds. They see the connection between the phenomenon of corruption in public office, economic iniquities, and social injustice. They look beyond organizational solutions in addressing the problem of corruption. They see corruption as systemic in a neocolonial state controlled by domestic elite whose interests are dictated by and intertwined with those of foreign big business. They consider institutionalized corruption, patronage politics and feudal agrarian relations as inseparably linked.
“A critical view is that corruption arises because the state is treated as one big business enterprise for extracting profit. It is a phenomenon inherent in a political system where the concept and practice of governance revolve around how political leaders and top bureaucrats, in collaboration with vested interests, abuse their positions of power to amass wealth at the expense of real public service and of promoting the welfare of the greater majority who are marginalized and poor.
“The war on corruption has taken and is still taking various forms, attacking at various aspects of the problem. Campaigns against corrupt public officials have led to electoral defeats and even popular uprisings. But the fact that corruption remains a festering cancer in Philippine society proves that the problem is of a systemic nature.”
Finally, the study concluded: “Only by looking to solutions that go beyond personalities and forms of government can there be a real possibility of winning the war against corruption. What we need is a thorough-going social and cultural transformation until we see public service not as a business enterprise and an opportunity to amass personal wealth but as a whole process of empowering the greater majority of our people who are hitherto marginalized and poor.”
I have extensively quoted this study of TI (Phil.) and CenPEG to show that corruption in government is indeed an immensely complex problem and that the war against it can never, never be won simply by a cascade of hypocrisies and a surplus of confused and confusing statements, like those very often mouthed by Noynoy Aquino, his political sycophants and image-shapers.
Lots of talk, but no actions!
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