Whistleblowing: New Phl cottage industry

I hate whistleblowers. And I hate the way whistleblowers are being used. But let me qualify that. My hatred is rooted only in the context of how whistleblowing has become a new cottage industry in the Philippines and not in the light of how it ought to be seen as a desperate but viable judicial tool.

Whistleblowers are insiders, usually of scam operations. Normally, they are as guilty as hell and ought to be punished in accordance with the gravity of their offenses. But as the law can sometimes go out on a limb in desperate times, as in offering "dead or alive" bounties, so was born the need to embrace whistleblowers.

Whistleblowers, as the term suggests, blow the whistle on other participants to a scam. But the notion of granting legal concessions to whistleblowers in accordance with the level of their participation falls under the weight of the conspiracy theory, which makes no distinction between the act of one and the acts of others.

But trust the Philippines to carry out the most ridiculous legal and judicial calisthenics depending on who is beating out the cadence on a drum. For as long as a whistleblower can demolish an identified target, the rat is at once accorded state privileges, even by unauthorized persons, such as being anointed state witness.

There is nothing honorable about whistleblowing in the Philippines to merit state privileges, even if they help carry out justice because those tasked to prosecute in justice's name are too lazy or inefficient to do the job themselves, because of the manner in which they were born as whistleblowers.

The only time whistleblowers can be vested a certain degree of honor and dignity is when, out of their own volition — because maybe the Archangel Gabriel appeared to him in a dream with a message from God — they suddenly realized the gravity of their sins and now want to atone and change.

But that has never, repeat, never been the case in the Philippines and the practitioners of its whistleblowing industry. In all cases, the whistleblower became one only because the noose has tightened around his or her own neck so that, in a desperate bid at self-preservation, he or she must now rat on the others.

There is no courage in that, contrary to what the hapless Philippine senators effusively told the whistleblowers directly to their faces, clearly oblivious to the admonition to be wary of compliments unleashes frontally.

Whistleblowing in the Philippines is nothing more than a dignified means of treachery. All the whistleblowers that have so far been paraded by politicians have not been driven by remorse or an honest desire to turn a new leaf. Their consciences were never pricked, their morals never assailed.

Go check their stories. It is either they were on the verge of falling themselves, or had axes to grind against their co-conspirators. That the agents who brokered their appearances are either politicians with their own agendas or co-opted government officials with debts of loyalty to pay should have been a dead giveaway.

But we never pay attention to these telling details. We do not ask the deeper and more relevant questions of ourselves. We just lap up what we are served by our officials. And then we have the temerity to ask what hit us?

Look, I would probably begin to believe a whistleblower if, in the dead of night, he or she would come knocking on the door of a priest, preferably one with still a high degree of credibility like Cardinal Tagle and there pour his heart out and it is Tagle, deciding on his own conscience, who brings him in to sing.

But no, that has never been the case with the Philippine whistleblowing industry. It is not an endeavor unto itself, as in to make right what is wrong, but as a means to an end, an ancillary undertaking to a main business, which is politics.

Go check the records. Since when has a single whistleblower been paraded by anybody else but by a politician. Since when has a whistleblower been paraded for any purpose other than to demolish another politician. Guess where they are paraded first — never in a court of law but in media and the political arena.