Activity Updates


September 2010 - Launch of the maiden issue of the Focus on the Global South Policy Review

September 19 - In Malaysia will be held the forum called "Regional Strategy Meeting on Emerging Social and Cultural Concerns in ASEAN: Climate Change, South East Asian Peoples’ Right to Information, Labor Migration and Domestic Work and Platforms for Civil Society Engagement with the ASEAN."  Focus Philippines will make a presentation on "Building a Case for an ASEAN Protocol on Freedom of Information"

September 23 - 26 - Asean People's Forum in Hanoi, Vietnam. Fore more information, please send inquiries to the following: <apfhanoi-pc@aseanpeoplesforum.net>, <apfhanoi-ws@aseanpeoplesforum.net>. Ms Dorothy Guerrero, who is in the Bangkok office of Focus, seats in the Program Committee.

September 27 - October 1 - Freedom of Information Advocacy Week

September 23 - FOI Forum
     
September 27 - R2KRN will visit the Senate to renew the FOI campaign
     
September 28 - R2KRN will meet with Representatives of the Lower House
Home arrow Newsletter arrow Articles arrow What’s at Stake in the President’s Anti-Corruption Crusade?
What’s at Stake in the President’s Anti-Corruption Crusade? PDF Print E-mail
by Herbert Docena*

No other President in recent memory has played the anti-corruption card as successfully as President Noynoy Aquino; his first SONA indicates that he will continue to do so during his presidency. This card—what we can call the “corruption discourse”—has been nicely captured in his slogan, “Kung Walang Korup, Walang Mahirap.” Its message is seductively simple without being necessarily deceptive: Round up all the corrupt officials and the problem of poverty will be solved. In the hands of a President who is perceived to be the “cleanest” of all presidents since Marcos, and whose immediate successor is seen as the most corrupt since Marcos, this discourse may yet become even more potent and resonant.

But why, in fact, is this discourse so powerful? And why is the President so keen on it?

In this deeply divided country, the corruption discourse is and will remain disarmingly powerful because it expresses one of those rare, seemingly universally shared goals that manages to bring people together from different parties, political persuasions, and classes.

The middle class love it because they obviously don’t like their hard-earned and automatically-withheld income taxes being squandered by trapos. The poor love it because it really does make some sense: a billion pesos that would otherwise have gone to tongpats could go to social services instead. And, of course, the ruling political class—even, or especially, the corrupt among them—love it because it gives them a ready weapon with which to discredit their opponents in their recurrent factional battles. Even foreign governments and agencies love it because when something goes wrong here, they can always wash their hands and say, “It’s because of those greedy, thieving natives.”

Like all powerful ideas, however, the corruption discourse draws its ability to bring people together by the intrinsic ambiguity of its terms.

What, after all, is “corruption”? Some will invoke the laws regarding government conduct, and say that corruption is whatever violates those laws. Others will say corruption is the use of public office for private gain. Let’s call the first answer the procedural and the second one the substantive definitions of corruption.

Both, however raise more questions: Suppose that GMA, in fact, followed all government rules to the letter when she decided to divert P105 million to the very district she was campaigning in as congresswoman—would that make her not corrupt?

The President’s own family continues to own shares in Luisita, despite agrarian reform, only because of an exemption that her late mother was able to insert into the law and only because he himself now seems bent on upholding this exemption. In other words, the powers of the presidency have been used to revise the law in ways that benefited their occupants—does that not count as the use of public office for private gain?

If each of these questions sound provocative, it is because they ultimately raise difficult questions about how to classify corruption, about where the “real” boundary between “corruption” and “not corruption” should be. The problem is that those boundaries were not etched in stone since time began: Instead, like other moral boundaries in society, they have always been the object of constant struggle among those whose interests—as well as values—are affected one way or another by where those boundaries are drawn.

Because interests are involved, this struggle can’t not be about class: The dominant class—precisely because much of its privileges rest on “substantive” corruption—has an obvious interest in insisting on a “procedural” definition of corruption. They also just happen to write the procedures most of the time. The dominated class for its part—precisely because it arguably has an interest in the use of public office for public interest—has much to gain from pushing for the boundaries to encompass substantive corruption.

As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, classificatory struggles are the forgotten dimensions of class struggles, but more may be won or lost than just control over the productive forces. No less than people’s minds are at stake.

At the same time, however, this struggle is not reducible to class. It is possible, after all, for some of the rich to agree with some of the poor on one thing: that GMA was corrupt, regardless of what the rules say, simply because what she did was wrong and for no other reason.

Beneath the universalizing corruption discourse then are deeper and overlapping class and moral divisions. But, in its appeal for unity, this discourse tries to gloss over what is really at stake in these struggles by framing the issue as though the only question that matters is whether we are against corruption—who isn’t?—when the real question is, what kind of corruption are we against, and where do we want the boundaries to be drawn?

Whether President Aquino is aware of it or not, each of his actions or pronouncements regarding corruption—what he considers corrupt and not corrupt, who he persecutes and doesn’t persecute—will be attempts to fix the disputed boundaries in one place instead of another, according to his personal or class interests and/or moral convictions.

Where that place will be is not just an inconsequential philosophical question: it will decide what is allowed and not allowed, what is seen as moral and immoral, who gets jailed, who gets perceived as “clean,” who gets to keep their hacienda, who stays poor and how.

Where the boundaries are drawn will determine, after all, how the promise of the corruption discourse can be achieved: Either poverty will be reduced because, with everyone following the procedures, there might be more money to pass around—but with the dominant still having the ultimate say in what and how much gets passed around, allowing them to tell the dominated to be grateful for the “charity.”

Or, poverty will be alleviated because, if everyone used public office only for public gain, then everyone would be closer to getting what they rightfully deserve. n

*Herbert Docena is a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.
 
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