Nation building

Two former officials of the Cagayan State University (CSU) have been sentenced by the Sandiganbayan to 10 years for graft for awarding a computer contract without public bidding. The amount involved: P1.2 million.

That’s right, 1.2. Not 120, not even 12. And it’s million, not billion.

The case reinforces a lesson learned by Pinoys since the Marcos years: if you’re going to engage in corruption, you have to think big. The larger the amount involved, the greater your chance of getting away with it.

Ask for a commission for a P1.2-million deal and you go to prison. Ask for a $30-million commission (pared down to $2.5 million) and you get a pat on the back from your bosses plus a reassurance of keeping your position. And your accuser is called a self-serving liar. End of story.

Put even larger amounts of people’s money in your private bank account, systematically, over many years, and you can become a mayor, provincial governor, senator or congressman, or even president.

Penny ante graft can encourage immoderate greed and progress into major thievery, so Pinoys should be glad that small fry entrusted with public funds are being sent to prison for betraying public trust.

Government procurement laws require competitive bidding for projects or programs costing over P250,000 (the amount, I was told, has been raised to P500,000), so the P1.2 million in the CSU deal was above the minimum. Crooks learned to go around this requirement and avoid auditors’ radar by “splitting” contracts into smaller increments – a practice specifically prohibited by law, and which was not resorted to by the two former CSU officials.

It’s good to know that people get convicted for these offenses. A common question these days, however, is whether any big fish will also be convicted and sent to prison for large-scale corruption.

With the truckloads of documents provided by the Commission on Audit, I don’t think any of the lawmakers identified in the pork barrel scam can avoid being charged in court. Plunder being a serious offense, bail may not be allowed once arrest warrants are issued. Will the court treat all defendants equally – lawmaker, local government executive, Janet Lim-Napoles – and order their detention?

Also, it’s disheartening to know that it took the Sandiganbayan over a decade to hand down its verdict on the CSU case. The computer deal was awarded way back in 1996. With appeals that could reach the Supreme Court, it may take a generation before we get the final verdict. That’s an interminable, atrocious wait for justice in what is supposed to be a simple case.

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People from countries that underwent a difficult transition to a stable, prosperous democracy have reminded me that the process is rarely easy. A generation is a reasonable time frame for meaningful change to take root in society, according to Michael Hasper. He’s the chargé d’affaires of the German embassy, which hosted a belated celebration of its Unity Day last night.

The Germans know about the difficulty of transition to a modern democracy. From Nazism to communism and national partition, followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification the next year, the road to a modern Germany has been tortuous.

And yet, even with painful reunification, Germany remains the strongest economy in the troubled Eurozone and one of the strongest in the world. With a global reputation for quality and cutting-edge technology, Germany is the world’s third largest exporter after China and the United States.

Shaken by the Holocaust, the Germans are strong advocates of human rights.

“We had the catastrophe of the Third Reich. (Adolf) Hitler destroyed all basis of law and human rights,” Hasper told me during a visit to The STAR the other day. “We started really from scratch.”

What didn’t kill them truly made them strong. The same can be said of the Koreans, whose National Day, Oct. 3, coincides with German Unity Day. After a bloody, internecine war that divided their country and rendered every citizen impoverished, and after being devastated by the Asian financial crisis in 1997, South Koreans rebounded impressively. The country is an industrial and economic powerhouse, and it is exporting even its popular culture worldwide.

Taiwan, which celebrates its National Day tomorrow, is also a prosperous democracy despite being sidelined diplomatically by China. Perhaps wars, particularly bloody civil wars, have a way of fostering national identity and unity.

These National Days tend to evoke comparisons between the state of the Philippines and what other countries have achieved in recent decades. The cultures, history and circumstances are of course different, and it’s not fair to compare the development trajectory of Germany or even South Korea with that of the Philippines.

But we can learn some lessons from others on nation-building. These days we are being compared with Indonesia, which beat us in getting investment grade some time ago and in many economic and human development indicators. Indonesia has gone through bloody political upheavals, with the latest occurring even more recently than our original people power revolt. Yet the Indonesians are well ahead of us even in the anti-corruption campaign.

Several people whose business it is to keenly observe regional developments have asked me about Indonesia and the Philippines: similar cultures, similar problems, similar colonial and post-colonial history, similar political systems. Both democracies and open markets. We even share the same gene pool. Now what factors have made the Indonesians sprint ahead of us?

We can look on the bright side and believe that we’re catching up. Strengthening the rule of law would be a good start, with the law applied equally to both small fry and big fish.

The other day a rumor that one of the lawmakers identified in the pork barrel scam was contemplating suicide prompted suggestions to send him sturdy rope for hanging, or cyanide.

The wife of one of the lawmakers memorably threatened in a TV interview to stop giving dole-outs to their poor constituents now that pork barrel releases have been stopped.

That attitude betrays a common mindset among public officials in this country, which sees people’s money as private funds.

Will it take a generation to change this mindset? The nation can’t afford to wait that long. Attitude change can be fast-tracked if the guilty – small fry and big fish alike – are held accountable and punished for treating public coffers as their private piggybank.