Reality check

When Noynoy Aquino rose to power, he was warned that a sincere effort to stamp out corruption– one that will not be open to charges of political persecution or selective prosecution  could wipe out the membership of Congress, decimate the ranks of local government executives and cripple the bureaucracy.

Today President Aquino, with his touted vow to eliminate poverty by eliminating corruption, is having a reality check.

Because P-Noy set the bar high, people expected officials of daang matuwid to be like Caesar’s wife. But how many members of his official family have been formally charged with corruption or plunder, or are under investigation for such offenses? The number has to be the highest ever.

We’re still waiting for the indictment of administration allies listed in Commission on Audit reports or implicated by whistle-blowers in the pork barrel scam operated by businesswoman Janet Lim Napoles. The COA listed nearly 200 senators and congressmen, most of them incumbent. Like the Metro Rail Transit (MRT) that keeps derailing, however, the pork barrel probe appears to have stopped at three opposition senators, one of whom had hoped to run for president in 2016.

And what ever happened to Napoles’ own “Napolist”? The Department of Justice initially seemed to believe it was worth pursuing.

On top of the scandal over the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) or pork barrel is the scandal over the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP), for which President Aquino himself may face criminal charges once he steps down and loses immunity from lawsuits.

Lawmakers who ousted Renato Corona as chief justice for corruption were themselves later implicated in the PDAF and DAP scandals. They continue to use their positions for partisan purposes and personal vendetta poorly disguised as inquiries in aid of unspecified legislation.

So far P-Noy has not been accused of personally enriching himself while in office. That Filipinos find this noteworthy of a president says a lot about the state of the nation.

But corruption is alive and well, whether in national agencies or local government units. LGUs depend on national government revenues but local executives want their turfs to be treated like independent republics. If the accusations are correct, local executives and supporters of daang matuwid’s Liberal Party even cornered a sweetheart deal and are behind MRT commuters’ woes.

With so many administration officials currently facing corruption complaints, Malacañang can only invoke the presumption of innocence and say that everyone is entitled to due process.

This allows P-Noy to keep his official family intact. Several times he has shown that he’s not the type who easily lets go of his officials, especially loyal friends.

The so-called P-Noy factor has boosted business confidence. But graft and unbridled influence peddling throughout the bureaucracy, unchecked by a weak and graft-prone judiciary, can undermine even a sincere anti-corruption campaign.

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How to deal with the problem, short of making all top public officials face the firing squad, is a common topic of conversation these days.

In the past two years, a recurring macabre proposal is to bomb the Batasang Pambansa during the State of the Nation Address. But proponents fear that the resulting clean slate will last long enough only until the spouses, siblings and children of the dearly departed can take over the vacant posts.

It’s like zapping termites: even when the queen has been destroyed, the pests continue emerging, as long as there’s food to be had and the opportunity to get it.

What might work is eliminating the termites’ food sources or putting these out of reach.

In the case of public funds, obviously these can’t be eliminated, but government officials’ personal discretion in fund utilization can be drastically reduced. This is the aim in the elimination of the PDAF and DAP.

There are enough laws to provide checks and balances in fund utilization; what’s needed is effective enforcement. P-Noy can strengthen the COA and the Office of the Ombudsman. He can support legislation to give more teeth to the Anti-Money Laundering Council.

Lawmakers have been as cool toward such legislation as they have been to proposed laws on campaign finance reforms. Campaign contributions, which require only token accounting before the Commission on Elections, are among the roots of large-scale corruption.

P-Noy is surely aware of this, but maybe he believes pitching reforms to beneficiaries of the rotten system is an exercise in futility. He can humor us by at least going through the motions, and then identifying to his “bosses” the legislators who are most opposed to the proposal.

As I have written, there is no such creature as a lame duck president in this country where the position wields immense power. There’s still a lot that P-Noy can achieve by way of reforms in the remaining 19-and-a-half months of his term.

A substantial reduction in red tape can be a powerful legacy. Red tape is the reason ordinary folks are forced to pay grease money. This is also one of the reasons for public perceptions that even under the tuwid na daan, it’s still business as usual at Customs, the Port of Manila, LGUs and other agencies notorious for fixers and “facilitation fees.”

The reforms called for here are procedural. Mere administrative orders will do to simplify systems and requirements in executive offices. Reduce the number of steps, set deadlines for completing each step, and identify the individual in charge of each step, so that responsibility for logjams can be pinpointed, with specified consequences for poor performance.

LGUs have their own ordinances covering businesses, the practice of professions, and delivery of public services. But the national government has persuasive ways of pushing reforms in LGUs.

There’s little that P-Noy can do about inefficiency and corruption in the judiciary – another reason for the persistence of corruption. And he’s right – there is judicial overreach that has been unhealthy for this country.

But he can do his part by appointing more magistrates to ease the case backlog – there are still a lot of courtrooms without a judge – and improving the vetting system for his appointments. A seat or promotion in the judiciary cannot depend on connections or membership in a political party or religious group.

With several of his officials and allies implicated in plunder, P-Noy can avoid accusations of hypocrisy and shift the focus of his anti-corruption campaign from individual personalities to institutional weaknesses.

He still has enough time to make a difference. Victory in a close game is decided in the last two minutes.