Missing link

ARE WE making great strides in the fight against corruption?

Yes and no.

The yes is patent. You compare the Senate hearings on the NBN deal with the one we have on the Garcia plea-bargaining case, and you see that the differences are monumental.

In the NBN case, you had a sense of the Senate working under a hostile environment. That environment was a government determined to cover up the perfidy, not least because it involved its highest officials leading up to the First Couple themselves. Though some of the senators performed brilliantly, with no small help from Jun Lozada, unearthing not just an entire conspiracy to defraud the public but an entire culture behind it—“moderate the greed” was one of the mind-boggling concepts it bequeathed to us—you had a feeling it would go the route of the Jose Pidal case, the “Hello, Garci” case, the Mega Pacific case.

Which it did.

In today’s investigation of the generals, you have a sense that the Senate can really get to the bottom of things, no small thanks to a government giving it no reason not to. The senators have been spirited in their interpellation, or interrogation. I particularly like the part where Franklin Drilon put Edgardo Yambao in a quandary by asking him if he was waiving his right to deposits totaling P255 million in various banks after he denied owning them. It made him reconsider his position posthaste. Not an easy choice: future loss of freedom for money laundering and/or tax evasion or immediate loss of a fortune for abandoning a claim to it.

You have the sense that this time around, the crooks won’t just be found, they will be punished. The newfound zeal has already driven someone to end his life, though that is probably more a testament to his own moral code than to the Senate’s heightened acuity. But though Angelo Reyes may be a fluke, his death helps to push back the culture of impunity, which applied not just to murder but to theft. Before this, the corrupt could rob the country blind and expect not be touched—not by the shadow of jail, not by the breath of death. Reyes’ death showed they can. Where their own hand fails, justice can always lend a hand.

Along with Merceditas Gutierrez’s impending impeachment, President Aquino’s “Pag walang corrupt, walang mahirap” seems to be getting a lot of traction. Those two things, the Senate hearing on Garcia and Gutierrez’s impeachment, are bound to impact on each other and reinforce each other, making them more than the sum of their parts. The signs are hopeful in that respect.

So, yes, we are making inroads in the fight against corruption.

The no is a lot less patent but no less real. You can see that too in one vital similarity between the NBN hearing and the Garcia one. That is the lack of public outrage surrounding it.

There is public interest surrounding it, but not widespread outrage, not deep-seated opprobrium, not complete and utter reprehension. There were pockets of it during the NBN hearing, particularly after Lozada narrated his abduction, and there are pockets of it now, particularly after Reyes took his own life. But it does not seep downward.

That’s the missing link in our investigations of corruption, in our hearings about pillage. In other countries, public opinion is very much a part of those investigations and hearings, public revulsion at the crooks, civil or military, is very much an element guaranteeing that they will be found out and punished. Not so here.

One is tempted to say that the solution is to exhort the public to be more vigilant of their rights, to be more watchful about their liberties, to be more jealous about their property. In part that is true: A great deal of indifference and cynicism has seeped into the culture, no small thanks to the last nine years, which needs pushing back. But it’s really more than that. Because the problem really is not that we are tolerant of the robbery that is taking place before our eyes, it is that we cannot see the robbery that is taking place before our eyes.

The common reaction from the man in the street, “Sila sila lang naman ’yan,” suggests the depth of the problem: It’s just a division of spoils. If corruption is robbery at all, it is robbery between public officials. They are robbing each other, they are screwing each other. They are not robbing us, they are not screwing us.

To be jealous of your property, you must know that it is your property. That’s the crux of the problem. Elsewhere in the world, that is very clear. Taxes are the people’s money, the national treasury is the people’s money, the money that public officials use is the people’s money. That is not at all clear here. We do not really see taxes as our money. We—the poor especially who imagine they do not pay taxes anyway when in fact they do courtesy of VAT—do not see taxes as something we entrust to government to give back to us in the form of roads and bridges and schoolhouses. We see taxes as gratuity, or tong, we are required to give our officials in the same way that serfs give up part of their harvest to their lords, in the same way that vassals give tribute to their masters. Once we give it to them, it is no longer our property, it is theirs.

We do make paeans to taxpayers’ money as being the people’s money, but that hasn’t seeped into the culture, that hasn’t seeped into the national consciousness. That is what needs to be done. The fight against corruption cannot be waged solely by government. That is impossible; all that it will lead to is a reasonably honest government succeeding in moderating the greed. So long as the people themselves are not incensed by corruption because they do not see it as stealing from them, so long will it thrive, moderated or not.

We’ve still a long way to go.