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Despite the usual pledge every Philippine government makes (the Arroyo administration is no exception) when it’s in power, Filipinos are still waiting for a big fish to be convicted of corruption. Many of them have tired of waiting, and are voting with their feet by moving elsewhere, even at the risk of rape, as in Malaysia, or of beatings, as in certain countries of the Middle East.

Joseph Estrada is so far the biggest fish of them all, but only in terms of his having been arrested and indicted. Estrada’s indictment was itself unprecedented in the Philippines and, at the time it happened, greeted by a middle class weary of government wrongdoing as a hopeful sign that something would finally be done about the world-class corruption that’s plagued this country since Marcos.

However, about Estrada’s conviction there is increasing doubt nowadays. It’s not because the middle-class people doubt Estrada’s guilt. They don’t, which may or may not be fair to Estrada. But there has crept into this class—among its academics, professionals and thoughtful journalists as much as among clerks and teachers—a sense of futility and resignation that anything can ever be done about this country’s problems with corruption or anything else.

One of the factors responsible for this sense is the Arroyo government’s having displayed sign after sign that for the sake of 2004 it’s willing to accommodate and compromise with everyone including the Estrada opposition. If the government can appoint Blas Ople to foreign affairs, it can very well try to influence the graft court. The Arroyo government is thus feeding rampant Filipino cynicism that anything can ever be done about the corruption that has become a critical factor in the country’s continuing—and from all indications worsening—poverty. That poverty has encouraged not only crime, but worse, a rampaging sense that the Philippines is a sinking ship everyone, and not only the rats in it, should abandon.

Presenting bank managers and petty government officials accused of various crimes to the media won’t work to erode this sense. Only the arrest, indictment and conviction of someone in the league of at least a department secretary will, and restore some hope that the country still has a future.

Which is what recently happened in Thailand, where the indictment of a former minister made the headlines over the weekend.

Thailand’s National Counter Corruption Commission (NCCC) found former Health Minister Rakkiat Sukthana guilty of being “unusually wealthy” and of intentionally filing false reports about his assets. “Unusually wealthy” is the Thai term for possession of unexplained wealth.

Rakkiat faces the seizure by the Thai government of nearly 234 million baht (approximately P300 million) in questionable assets plus a five-year ban on holding political office.

Although the verdict will have to be confirmed by the Thai Supreme Court and the Thai Constitutional Court, the verdict was hailed by NGO anticorruption activists, the media and government antigraft investigators as an indication that the Thai system is serious about dealing with corruption.

A representative of an alliance of NGOs thus described the verdict as “historic” and the “outcome of an effective constitutional mechanism” to deal with corruption.

Rakkiat is “one of the biggest fish” to be caught by the NCCC, said Bangkok’s English-language newspaper The Nation.

The verdict came four years after Rakkiat was accused of having collected millions in kickbacks from a 1.4 billion baht (about P2 billion) scam in which overpriced medical supplies were purchased by the health ministry for distribution to government hospitals.

Health activists and the Public Health Ministry asked the NCCC to investigate Rakkiat in the aftermath of a scandal over the purchases. The NCCC said at the conclusion of its investigation that it could not account for hundreds of millions of Rakkiat’s assets, and concluded that he was guilty either of acquiring the money illegally or of failing to report it and to explain its origins.

Rakkiat, said witnesses, documentary evidence and Rakkiat himself, confirmed that his bank accounts swelled when he became health minister. He was also accused of keeping his wealth in the accounts of other people including his wife, his sister-in-law and friends.

The verdict has visibly lessened cynicism among both the media in Thailand and ordinary citizens over the possibility of dealing with the problem of corruption, indicating to many people that the Thai system works.

There is so far no indication that there will ever be a similar case in the Philippines, which would restore some faith in the capacity of the justice system to do something about corruption.

And yet corruption is a problem every Filipino knows about but feels cannot be dealt with beyond false promises and the usual clichés about good government. The extent of public knowledge includes awareness of what the most corrupt government agencies are. Ask a Filipino for a list and he will unhesitatingly provide the following: the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH); the Department of Education; the Bureau of Customs; the police and military, among others.

Anecdotal evidence abounds of this police general who’s built a mansion he obviously cannot afford on his salary alone, and of military officers earning the salaries of Makati clerks who live in Greenhills and Corinthian. Government contractors will tell anyone who wants to listen about how a road or a bridge or any other infrastructure is either overpriced by 30 percent, or constructed poorly because contractors have to bribe district engineers and other DPWH bureaucrats.

These bureaucrats live in grand houses and are driven around in luxury cars. They and their families vacation in Europe and the United States. Their bank accounts, many of them under other names, contain hundreds of millions. To believe that they obtained these amenities from the salaries they make is to strain credibility. The conviction that they obtained these through illegal means is, on the other hand, rampant and most probably correct. They are, in the Thai phrase, “unusually wealthy.”

And yet they go on their merry way in a country where, as a result of their corruption among other reasons, 60 percent of the population live below the poverty line. This makes them responsible for the early deaths, the mass ignorance and rampaging misery among some 48 million people—the indicators of the poverty that has haunted this country for decades.

In other countries the suspicion that a government official is likely to have amassed wealth illegally is enough ground for anticorruption commissions to cause his arrest and to issue indictments. Not so in the Philippines, where, if things don’t change, the social and political cataclysm the elite and every government that has ever acted in its behalf fears is likely to erupt as more and more Filipinos are impoverished, and as more and more of them begin to see that there are only two options: to leave the sinking ship, or to take it over.

(ABS-CBNNEWS.COM/TODAY, September 17, 2002)

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