Two Ex-Presidents Make It to World’s Hall of Scalawags
GMA’s Anti-Corruption Policies are Ineffective, London-based Watchdog Says

Strongman Ferdinand Marcos and Joseph Estrada – both ousted by people power 15 years apart each other – are two heads of state who made it to an international corruption watchdog’s gallery of rogues. But Transparency International also scores the Macapagal-Arroyo presidency for its “ineffective” anti-corruption programs.

By Bobby Tuazon
Bulatlat.com

his overthrow, died in Hawaii in 1989. Estrada, a movie actor who was president July 1998-January 2001, is being held pending the resolution of plunder chases by the Sandiganbayan (anti-graft court). He stands accused of stealing P4.1 billion.

But Estrada quickly protested the London-based TI’s report and threatened to sue the watchdog. Newspapers quoted the ousted president describing the report as a smear campaign and that it was issued to discredit the presidential bid of his friend, actor Fernando Poe, Jr. Estrada and his forces are supporting Poe’s candidacy.

Topping TI’s gallery of rogues is Mohammed Sukarno, president of Indonesia from 1967-1989, with US$35 billion in embezzled funds. The rest included: Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire, 1965-1997); Nigeria’s Sani Abacha (1993-1998); Serbia/Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic (1989-2000); Haiti’s Jean-Claude Duvalier (1971-1986); Peru’s Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000); Ukraine’s Pavlo Lazarendo (1996-1997); and Nicaragua’s Arnoldo Aleman (1997-2002).

The Philippines is the only country with two heads of state in the TI list. Transparency’s Corruption Perception Index 2003 placed the country 92^nd out of 133 countries with a score of 2.5 out of a perfect 10. The year before, the Philippines scored 2.6.

Vote buying, according to TI, is also a major problem in the Philippines. In the 2002 barangay (village) elections, three million voters received bribes.

Country report

Gabriella Quimson, who wrote the country report on the Philippines, says that the anti-corrupt mechanisms placed by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who replaced Estrada, are mainly ineffective.

The “lifestyle check” initiated by the Presidential Anti-Graft Commission (PAGC) was meant to detect corruption through disparities between income and lifestyle among civilian and military bureaucrats. Still,  Quimson who is with the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland in Australia, says “mainly low-profile, middle-ranking officials have been exposed.”

The reform initiative has so far “proved largely ineffective against high-level officials,” she adds.

A few whistleblowers who exposed scams receive no protection or worse are themselves dragged into the cases they helped unearth, Quimson reports. Acsa Ramirez, who exposed a tax diversion scam involving $3.8 million) and implicating high officials of the Land Bank and the Bureau of Internal Revenue was herself paraded along with the suspects in a news conference where Macapagal-Arroyo was present.

Sulficio Tagud, Jr. was forced to resign as board member of the Public Estates Authority after revealing “illegal price adjustments and unsanctioned price escalations” totaling $11 million for the construction of the 5-km President Diosdado Macapagal Boulevard in Manila. He also received death threats.

PEA officials, Quimson says citing press reports, continue to defy the president’s order to vacate their positions.

Under Macapagal-Arroyo’s orders all the PEA board members – including Tagud – are disqualified from future government service. The PEA scam, Tagud says, should be a “warning to those who want to expose corruption in government – shut up or suffer this fate.”

Plunder

In a special report last year, the People’s Media Center (PMC) said that in the Philippines, corruption involves the embezzlement of public funds for personal gain, nepotism, electoral bribes, abuse in legislative perks and privileges and anomalous tax assessments and collections.

“In both the Marcos and Estrada regimes, corruption involved the highest offices where political power was used to plunder public funds, amass private wealth through illicit connections and allocation of illegally-obtained wealth to favor cronies and associates,” PMC said.

Corruption saps government resources, denies the poor of basic services and undermines public confidence in the state’s will and capacity to serve the public. A report by Teresita N. Angeles (“An Anti-Corruption Strategy for the Philippines,” Australian National University, 1999) reveals that corruption cost the Philippine economy 10 percent of GNP or P8 billion. This worsened five years later with an NGO, Gising Bayan, estimating that P100 million was being lost daily with Transparency International (TI) citing the Philippines as the eighth most corrupt nation in the world.

In 1996, the Ombudsman disclosed that the government had lost P1.4 billion annually in the previous six years. Although this showed a slight improvement in anti-corruption efforts, the country was still ranked 11th by TI. “Unofficial estimates,” Angeles reports, “are that corruption now adds roughly 30 percent to the cost of major infrastructure projects.”

Often cited as the most corruption-riddled agencies in government are the Bureaus of International Revenue (BIR), Customs (BoC) and Immigration (BI); the Departments of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), Education (DepEd), Health (DoH) and Interior and Local Government (DILG); National Irrigation Administration (NIA) and Land Transportation Office (LTO).

“So endemic has corruption become that two years ago surveys by the Social Weather Stations (SWS) revealed 60 percent of Filipinos believed that there were significant levels of corruption within the judiciary itself,” PMC also disclosed. Bulatlat.com

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