‘When one senator says, ‘all of us are guilty,’ then you know that no one will be found guilty. Because whoever is made the scapegoat knows enough about everyone else to bring the house down.’
YESTERDAY, most of the Philippines took a breather from day-to-day activities in memory of a man and his sacrifice.
Ninoy Aquino, like most politicians, was no saint, but his death on the tarmac of the then-named Manila International Airport helped redeem his name as it helped awaken his countrymen. Awaken from the acceptance of how things are done towards the ideal of how things should be.
But that awakening took time, because old habits die hard. And the awakening culminated in the now famous People Power (or EDSA) Revolution of 1986 that saw Metro Manila (largely) mass in front of tanks in such numbers that the political and military establishment caved in and thus ushered in a new beginning.
The new beginning was quick to reveal the excesses of the former order. From cash to shoes to jewelry to houses, nothing on the magnitude of what has been termed a “kleptocracy” has ever been seen in the country.
But old habits die hard. Habits rooted in the Filipino culture, seeping through Filipino society, and motivating many a politico-wannabe: government is the way to make money when government is seen as the last hope for the needy.
It will be 40 years next year since the EDSA Revolution, but corruption has not been dead and buried during the same period. The recent ado about corruption in flood control projects has opened Pandora’s floodgates to more and more exposés, but I am not hopeful. Too many vested interests are at stake, and too many are with soiled hands that we can expect the political establishment to circle the wagons. The establishment will need to make sure that this serious challenge to their grip on power dies away, and fast.
When one senator says, “all of us are guilty,” then you know that no one will be found guilty. Because whoever is made the scapegoat knows enough about everyone else to bring the house down.
In my book, the excesses of the first Marcos presidency have been made a convenient foil for successive administrations to rape and steal from the national coffers with hardly a peep from the rest of us. Why? Since 1986, corruption has been democratized, practiced at every level, leaving so very few untainted along the way. And if you add up everything that has been pocketed since 1986, then what was pocketed until 1986 is mere peanuts.
Think about it: our national budget has been about P3 or P4 trillion annually since the Duterte years. Duterte was in office for six years, BBM for three. And I ask now as I asked then: how much is the leakage? If we put it at a “saintly” 10% at ₱3 trillion per year for nine years, then that’s ₱300 million for nine years or ₱2.7 trillion lost to “leakage”.
Where did that go? To the elected officials who are quick to protest that public office is “unrewarding”?
In my senior years, I have a difficult time escaping the sad conclusion that we Filipinos don’t want to wake up and face the inconvenient truth that EDSA 1986 didn’t change our values; we only rearranged the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. Same practices only raised to an art form. Politicians who will hang on to power for dear life because being in power means money and money means influence, which in turn begets more power and money and influence.
That’s why ordinary people drown in floodwaters. Because what is happening isn’t visible to the naked eye of the man on the street, who prefers to be entertained or distracted when he is not asleep.
We are all guilty, you and I. And that’s why we are drowning in corruption.
