Still, corruption

P-NOY HAD a timely message for the graduating class of the Philippine Military Academy. “You took on this career,” he said, “not to enrich yourselves. I face all of you today because you chose to serve this nation… That is why I trust that when someone dumps a truckload of cash at your feet, you all have the courage to turn it down because the values instilled in you by PMA would prevail.”

He exhorted the graduates not to follow the example of those who had succumbed to amnesia, the generals and their wives who could not remember the mind-boggling amounts they had managed to claim as their own. He challenged them to follow instead in the footsteps of Gregorio del Pilar who embraced honor, who remembered only his love of country and his duty as a soldier of the Katipunan, the original republic.

At the very least what makes P-Noy’s message timely is that the PMA is badly in need of it. Honor and duty are the things the military establishment stands for but they are the last things to be found in it today. Or so if the current Senate investigation on the conduct of the generals is anything to go by. “Soldier’s honor” and “soldier’s duty” have become like “military intelligence”—a contradiction in terms. Or perhaps more accurately “general’s honor” or “general’s duty”: In the military, as you rise upward in rank, you fall downward in morals.

At the very most what makes P-Noy’s message timely is that he is the one saying it. None of his predecessors could have said it, except his mother. Daring people to kick away truckloads of money dumped on their feet is certainly something his immediate predecessor could not have said, or since she wasn’t beyond pushing anything, including her luck, could not have said without provoking much laughter from the gallery.

P-Noy can: He has been criticized for many things, but none of them includes being a crook. He has at least the moral weight to carry out his crusade based on his battle cry, “Pag walang corrupt, walang mahirap.”

But I don’t know that corruption always takes the form of a dramatic choice between a truckload of cash and one’s principles. That is to say, I don’t know that the choice always easily presents itself in black and white: to be corrupt or to be honest, to be crooked or to be straight, to steal or not to steal. The problem is far more complicated. Corruption, particularly in this country, is full of gray areas. That doesn’t just make it hard to solve, that makes it hard to define.

What do we really mean when we say that a public official is not corrupt? Do we mean someone, elected or appointed, who relies solely on his salary and allowances to live? Do we mean someone, elected or appointed, who has no business interest, or who truly divests himself of his business interest if he has one, and awards no government contract to friend or front? If that’s how we define a public official who is not corrupt, finding one in the three branches of government and the military may be harder than finding 10 just men in Sodom and Gomorrah.

The fact that candidates spend a fortune to get elected is already a dead giveaway: We assume not just that he will try to recoup his expenses once he gets elected but that he is entitled to it, provided his return on investment is “reasonable.” The fact that everyone rushes to join government, indeed the fact that everyone in the presidential retinue turns resolutely sycophantic, making it a point not to be out of sight of the President for very long (the current government is no exception) is yet another dead giveaway. Given that public-sector rates are a pittance compared to private-sector ones, indeed given that public sector rates are an invitation to penury, as P-Noy himself says, why are people driven like moths to a flame to join government, even bringing out daggers with which to stab rivals in the back? Either we have an excess of self-sacrificing martyrs determined to serve the country at all costs, or we have a bunch of people hungry for loot.

Scholars tell us that the problem of corruption dates back to Spanish times, the governor-generals being expected to plunder so long as they did not plunder too grossly. That premise was tacitly held by the auditors who audited the governor generals before they left. They expected them to plunder enough to live comfortably when they went back to Spain after distributing to the auditors their usual bribes. Not too grossly meant not debilitating government enough to allow a revolt to succeed.

I suspect that premise has persisted over time and seeped into the culture. The problem with it of course is that “not too grossly” is not the easiest thing to define; it is open to market forces. Or the incumbent can always raise the bar to exceptionally high levels provided he has the armed might to do it. Marcos did, GMA did. Fighting corruption in this sense has only been a matter of lowering the bar, or “moderating the greed,” as Romulo Neri so felicitously put it.

Frankly, I don’t know that we really have a concept of the corrupt, in the sense of someone who appropriates taxpayers’ money for his own purposes. I suspect that what we do have is a concept of sugapa, one who plunders too grossly, according to our constantly changing definitions of gross. We pretty much go by instinct on that one. Marcos and GMA were sugapa. Erap was sugapa, but was caught in time. The people involved in the NBN-ZTE were sugapa. Ligot and Garcia and their backers are sugapa. Therefore they are corrupt. As to the secretaries, senators and congressmen, justices and generals, one of whom has yet to retire poor if we go by their meager government pay, the only question really is the one Angelo Reyes asked with genuine astonishment:

“Was I greedy?”