Passion For Reason
A ‘feckless pluralism’
By Raul Pangalangan
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:14:00 08/01/2008
Filed Under: Graft & Corruption, State of the Nation Address (SONA), NBN deal, Politics
MANILA, Philippines—President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo delivered her State of the Nation Address (SONA) completely oblivious to the past year’s biggest corruption scandal that defined the state of the nation’s morals. Her two most dramatic policy statements—about the need to maintain the value-added tax in order to finance welfare measures for the poor and to eschew modern family planning in favor of the Catholic Church-approved “natural” methods—have only elicited cynicism. Sure we can pay more taxes, but to this government? Corrupt, inept and beholden to local elites, warlords and men of the cloth alike?
Recall the events since the previous SONA. A Cabinet member testified under oath before the Senate that the chief of the Commission on Elections offered him a P200-million bribe to approve a $329-million national broadband network (NBN) contract with China’s ZTE Corp. He reported this to the President, who advised him to approve the contract nonetheless. An impeachment case was then filed in Congress against the President. Soon, a respected congressman revealed that he was offered P2 million by a Palace operative. Two days later, 189 of the President’s congressional allies were summoned to Malacañang, and left with bags containing P200,000 to a half million in cash. Scarcely three days later, Pampanga province’s Gov. Eduardo Panlilio revealed that he also received a half million in cash at a breakfast meeting of governors with the President.
In the ensuing scandal, NBN-ZTE star witness Rodolfo Noel Lozada Jr. was summoned to testify before the Senate, but was instructed by his Cabinet boss to go abroad. Lozada insisted on returning home, but was kidnapped by government operatives (“rescued,” they said) upon his arrival at the airport. Since February 2008, he and his family have lived under the sanctuary offered by the nuns, and he can move around only with tight security. Lozada has testified—again under oath before the Senate—that after he surfaced following the kidnapping, he was given another half million (which he returned), and the Malacañang lawyer who gave it to him confirmed the amount, with the incredible story that he gave that humongous dole from the goodness of his heart.
And amid this endless chain of astronomical gifts and cockamamie explanations, guess who was sued before the courts? The Cabinet officials? The bribe-givers? The kidnappers? No, it was Jun Lozada and his wife! Perjury (against Mrs. Lozada for reporting to the police her husband’s kidnapping), theft, graft and malversation. The National Bureau of Investigation is running after the whistleblower, not the bribe-givers and -takers.
These events tell us more about the state of the republic than the President’s SONA. The institutions of public accountability have failed. They do not work against those in power. They work only against those who don’t have power. It is increasingly meaningless to say that we must respect the rule of law, to insist that any change of leadership be in accordance with the Constitution. We hang on to the Constitution not because of its power to legitimize, which lately has been invoked solely by the illegitimate. We hang on to it merely by default, because in the stalemate among political forces and bereft of a consensus on the substantive issues of the day, we defer to the legal scaffolding that provides a supposedly neutral framework for choosing which faction of the elite will rule.
Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a 2002 essay entitled “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” could very well have been describing us when he wrote about the “feckless pluralism” that masquerades as democracy.
These countries “tend to have significant amounts of political freedom, regular elections, and alternation of power between genuinely different political groupings. [H]owever, democracy remains shallow and troubled. Political participation, though broad at election time, extends little beyond voting. Political elites from all the major political parties [are seen] as corrupt, self-interested, and ineffective [‘not serious about working for their country’]. The alternation of power seems only to trade the country’s problems back and forth from one hapless side to the other… Overall, politics is widely seen as stale, corrupt, elite-dominated... And the state remains persistently weak.”
Citing examples from Latin America and in the post-communist world, he continues: “[T]he parties that alternate power between them are divided by paralyzing acrimony and devote their time out of power to preventing the other party from accomplishing anything at all. [Elsewhere] the … deeply entrenched parties essentially operate as patronage networks …. [But there is] a common condition that seems at the root of feckless pluralism—the whole class of political elites, though plural and competitive, are profoundly cut off from the citizenry, rendering political life an ultimately hollow, unproductive exercise.”
The last remaining function of our post-Ferdinand Marcos Constitution today is merely to provide the structure for contests over power, and President Arroyo, whose power is periodically contested, has protected herself with the mantle of constitutionalism. Yet it is she who has done the worst damage to her cause by manipulating that Constitution for illicit ends, to sic the National Bureau of Investigation against whistleblowers like Jun Lozada while insulating her allies from prosecution. Crying wolf, or to be more precise, crying “rule of law” each time one of her own is caught with his hand in the till, is a self-obsolescing strategy. The more Ms Arroyo perverts the Constitution, the more she erodes its power to restrain the urge to rebel.
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