Knowing

Manila Auxiliary Bishop Broderick Pabillo has a very good point. If P-Noy wants to fight corruption, he should push for the freedom of information bill. “When we have freedom of information, we will know that the President is really serious in combating corruption,” he said. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s unliquidated cash advances would not have happened if we had freedom of information then. “That’s the problem when we don’t have transparency … those things are kept hidden.”

Of course, if the CBCP is serious in helping P-Noy fight corruption, it should call for the freedom of information bill to apply to the Church as well. The public should also have the right to inquire into the extent of its landholdings, its investments in banks, the size of its income in any given year. It should call for some of its members to be more forthcoming about the amounts they got from Arroyo for dismissing “Hello, Garci,” or about the PCSO’s gifts to them on their birthdays. Instead of calling on the PCSO to apologize for having the nerve to suggest they got Pajeros when they in fact got Monteros.

Arguably the Church is not the government, however the lines often tend to be blurred. We do not pay taxes to it. At least officially. The faithful do pay taxes to it in an indirect way through alms and other gratuities, with a view to buying a berth in heaven, a belief much encouraged by the Church itself with its doctrine of indulgences, which sounds like a way of bribing God or the intercessors who are malakas with him.

But that’s another story. None of it makes Pabillo’s point any less to the point. True enough, it’s surprising that P-Noy hasn’t signified the FOI as urgent the way he has the RH bill. True enough, it’s dismaying how Malacañang has been hedging on it, citing all sorts of excuses for not embracing it. The people who complained about its absence in the Sona have reason to do so. Of course, you can’t squeeze every important advocacy into a Sona, but some things are more important than others, some things are more urgent than others. The FOI is one of them. It’s the key to rectifying the past. It is one of the strongest weapons in any fight against corruption. Its continuing absence in the government’s arsenal is as conspicuous as a raided armory.

What makes it even more so is P-Noy’s speech in the United States vowing to “institutionalize People Power,” not least by ensuring transparency in government. By ensuring “an openness that informs our people of the workings of the government and breeds an informed citizenry that vigorously participates in and elevates public discourse.” Nothing does that better than freedom of information.

That is so because it does not rest transparency on the willingness of a government to be transparent, or makes of it a thing that flows from the goodness of a president’s heart. It rests transparency on the power of a people to demand it, or makes of it a matter of right, something the people are naturally entitled to. Of course, it is good that we have a President who seems sincere and determined to make a clean breast of his government’s doings to the public. That is not enough. Whether he is so or not is not the point.

The point is that the people have a right to have access to documents pertaining to anomalous transactions. The point is that the people have the right to information so that they can form an informed opinion on controversial issues. The point is that the people have a right to be empowered not by leave of God and government but by themselves.

Arguably, some lines have to be drawn. The banking secrecy law, for instance, is there for a purpose. You may not just demand to see, or appropriate, bank records. That will wreak havoc on the financial system. But you can always make all sorts of amendments later on. Passing the bill now is urgent, and should send a powerful message in the fight against corruption. Not least that “executive privilege,” which was what spawned the need for the people to be empowered to know to begin with, is dead and buried.

Better to err on the side of the people’s right to know than on national security, the latter being a concept more allied to despotism than to democracy. We don’t have to go far to see that. WikiLeaks, for all the attempts to belittle its importance, and for all the demonization that its founder has been subjected to, has been empowering for us. Its revelations in particular about American perceptions of Philippine officials, not to speak of American doings in this country, which include supporting Arroyo for her willingness to sell her country in exchange for political longevity, are eminently useful in forming an informed opinion on the nature of PH-US relations.

Not incidentally, they are an eye-opener too, for those whose eyes remain closed, unwittingly or nagtutulog-tulugan, about the nature of “national security.” More often than not, there’s nothing national about national security. The American doings in the world, quite apart from this country, tend to be inimical to the interests of the American people, in whose name they are done. Certainly they are inimical to us, who take the brunt of it.

The right of the people to know is the bedrock of democracy, which has always meant a strong people, not a strong government, or heaven forbid, “a strong republic,” real or imagined. It is the bedrock as well of honest government, or at least one that is not thoroughly corrupt. Government alone may not stop corruption, it needs the people to do it. It needs the people to be angry at corruption, to be furious at nakawan, to want to do something about the crooks in their midst. For that to happen, the people need to see who they are. The people need to see what they do.

The people need to know.