Our attitude toward corruption

“Corruption is a limp in the walk of human progress,” wrote professors Ghulam Shabbir and Mumtaz Anwar in a study entitled “Determinants of Corruption in Developing Countries” (2008). If it’s any consolation, “no region, and hardly any country, has been immune from corruption,” scholars say.

The World Bank describes corruption as “the single greatest obstacle to economic and social development. It undermines development by distorting the role of law and weakening the institutional foundation on which economic growth depends.”

But what if the shapes and shades of corruption have become, albeit subtly, socially acceptable?

The trial and eventual acquittal of former senator Ramon “Bong” Revilla Jr. from the charges of plunder show us a glimpse of that systemic reality. If the charges were murder or rape of a minor, for example, there would have been universal outrage and real shaming of even the high-profile accused.

However, when the charges are related to corruption, we as a nation are typically more forgiving. For sure there are noisy protests by concerned groups. But truth to tell, being indicted for stealing from taxpayers has never been on top of those we consider unacceptably shameful and intolerable.

How else could one explain the crowd of Revilla supporters outside the Sandiganbayan during promulgation day? This is not to mention his respectable showing in the senatorial surveys despite so-called “public adverse opinion” against him.

When a public official steals money from government coffers, or when he abuses his position for personal gain, “it is not as if” he committed a sin as serious as robbery or drug peddling, or as grievous as murder or rape. Our collective sense, to be frank, is that he has merely succumbed to a common temptation that comes with the position, without the slightest hint of losing face.

We do perfunctorily condemn acts of corruption. I say perfunctorily because our condemnation seems to run through only in the mere assertions of the letter of the law, without piercing through the socio-cultural realities that allow corruption to persist.

That is why when a court of law exonerates a public official who is facing serious charges of corruption, we immediately cry that the justice system leans in favor of the elite and the corrupt. We merely leave the duty and burden to run an efficient and corrupt-free government to the law and the courts. We conveniently forget that we as a people have a collective stake towards a government we desire.

We as a people have not yet really understood in our guts what corruption is doing to us as a nation; that for starters, corruption is making our country weak. Precious and limited public resources for defense and infrastructure, for example, are wasted away in poor planning and execution. As a result, the Philippines has always been prone to be yanked in any direction by every shifting wave of geo-political forces.

We are blind to the failings of leaders who would prefer to be lapdogs of China or the US just so they can fend off domestic enemies. Leaders who salivate at the mere offer of loans and aid, especially “protection from internal destabilizers.”

We’re resurrecting the kind of leaders responsible for our labor export policy. Where some decades ago funds loaned to our country were stashed in Swiss banks, bought luxuries for the comfort of the ruling regime, and funded a war against an insurgency that arose because of the same policies compromised by corruption and patronage; much needed funds that never went to funding entrepreneurs, inventors and innovators, none to building factories and good quality infrastructure.