I came across a meme on Facebook that said: “The Philippines is one of the poorest countries but with the wealthiest government officials.” Okay, we aren’t dirt poor like Haiti or some countries in Africa.
Our economic managers insist we will be an upper middle-income country next year and ready to give up our ODA privileges.
But a recent SWS survey revealed that about 60 percent of Filipinos think they are poor. And that’s not because they want a Ferrari and can’t have it. They want food on the table and almost 50 percent say they are food poor and another 17 percent say they are borderline food poor. Our macroeconomic numbers cover the gross inequality in our society which explains why our leaders are rich and most people are poor.
The point of the meme is more about how our rich political leaders have failed to reduce the number of poor people through the years. The other point has to do with how our politicians became rich, in the first place. Short answer: corruption. The resources of the nation have been dissipated through the years by political leaders who fatten their wallets as our economy sunk while our regional peers became tigers.
There is a mini-documentary on Youtube that asks why the Philippines remains poor in a region of tiger economies. Our problem, the documentary suggested, is that we have been electing lousy leaders. They failed to use our abundant resources to lift our economy and our people out of poverty. Then it says we have also been electing leaders that are horribly corrupt. Even politicians with corruption cases are eligible to run for public office. And they win too.
No big time Filipino politician ever went to jail for corruption. Erap was found guilty of plunder by the Sandiganbayan but immediately pardoned by then president GMA. Prominent Filipino accountant Ben Punongbayan of P&A Grant Thornton observed that “corruption is actually a crime that regrettably goes generally unpunished.”
Unfortunately, our justice system is the best money can buy and corrupt politicians have the influence and the cash to avoid punishment.
The YouTube documentary pointed out that Singapore’s advantage was having Lee Kuan Yew as its founding leader and he was meticulous in assuring those serving in government with him are clean. LKY set up a special government agency whose sole function was to stop corruption at any level.
A better comparison now is Vietnam rather than Singapore. Vietnam was a war-torn country about the time Marcos, the father, declared martial law. Yet, we are eating the dust of Vietnam’s economic miracle. It is not just because its communist leadership exercised dictatorial powers. Marcos, the father, had dictatorial powers too but that only made the economy fall faster. Among others, presidential cronies abused the relationship with the palace.
Vietnam, however, is serious in fighting corruption. Two Vietnamese presidents resigned one after the other because of corruption charges. Vietnamese president Vo Van Thuong resigned after a little over a year in the position, after being implicated in an intense anti-corruption campaign. Thuong is the second president to resign in two years. Thuong became president in March 2023, two months after his predecessor Nguyen Xuan Phuc resigned to take “political responsibility” for corruption scandals during the pandemic.
We had a pandemic scandal too. We lost close to P20 billion on the Pharmally deals but no official has been taken to court despite the findings of the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee that a significant anomalous deal happened. Duterte, the father, even defended the deal.
The South Koreans have also been vigilant in punishing their presidents for corruption. Four of South Korea’s living ex-presidents have now either been convicted of corruption offences, or are in jail being tried or investigated, The Economist reported on April 7, 2018.
We can’t even get our Vice President to properly explain how she spent hundreds of millions of pesos her office received from the Treasury.
It seems that a prerequisite for being a tiger economy is the ability to punish corruption, even if it means sending a country’s president to jail. If that’s the case, we will forever be poor.
Corruption is why poverty remains entrenched in the Philippines. Noynoy Aquino is right: Kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap.
How does corruption cause poverty in the Philippines?
From the International Monetary Fund: “Corruption increases income inequality and poverty through lower economic growth; biased tax systems favoring the rich and well-connected; poor targeting of social programs; use of wealth by the well-to-do to lobby government for favorable policies that perpetuate inequality in asset ownership; lower social spending.”
Ben Punongbayan wrote that a DOJ official revealed in a seminar on good governance in Tokyo in 2019 that “the amount of corruption in the Philippines at the national level was then estimated at 20 percent of the annual national budget… If we apply the same proportion to the current 2024 national budget, the amount of corruption at the national level currently translates to an estimated amount of P1.6 trillion (and that’s every year). And that estimated amount relates only to corruption at the national government level. If we include estimates of similar corruption at the level of the LGUs and bribery amounts at both national and local levels, the overall total will certainly be gargantuan…”
“Clearly, widespread corruption has caused the Philippines to lose great opportunities continuously over a long period of time to become a more economically developed country. Equally sadly, the country will continue to lose such great opportunities in the foreseeable future.”
Rich politicians. Poor Filipinos. We must stop electing politicians who have neither conscience nor sense of shame. And unless we start sending big politicians to jail for corruption, we will forever be poor.
Boo Chanco’s email address is bchanco@gmail.com. Follow him on X @boochanco.