Public discourse, 2016 and the pork barrel scam

We are paying too much attention to Janet Napoles. We are letting her and her 3 senatorial co-accused shape public discourse on the PDAF scam.

Of course it is in their interest to shape public opinion to mitigate their guilt. The President already explained what they are doing some 8 months ago: “If you can’t explain it, muddle it; if you can’t deodorize it, make everyone else stink; if you can’t look good, make everyone look bad. You have heard what they are saying: that we are all the same.”

The closer we get to senators actually getting jailed, the louder the protestations of innocence. They probably actually believe they are innocent. While it is not true that everyone is guilty, the prevailing political culture expects politicians to generate resources for their allies, and not incidentally, for themselves. So the good senators believe they were only doing what is expected of them. As Erap once put it, “weather weather lang yan” – everyone has a turn at feeding on the public trough.

It is true that Napoles was not the only one working the PDAF racket. It is also true that the 3 senators were not the only ones benefiting. Pork barrel as a source of patronage and corruption was so pervasive that it affected the whole political system. It even shaped the way we think about politics.

So, yes, the DOJ and the Ombudsman are being selective. But not in the way the accused senators and assorted critics of the administration say, that only opponents of the administration are being targeted. Those who have been selected for prosecution were selected because they are the ones with abundant evidence of participation in the Napoles scam, enough evidence to prosecute.

The question we have to ask is why – if it is not exactly losing the propaganda war of the Napoles scam – the PNoy administration has been put on the defensive so many times. One answer is that those who are being prosecuted are powerful people, with lots of resources, and lots of friends in media. Another is that there are political players, national democrats and segments of the Catholic Church among others, who will always look for an angle on any issue to attack the PNoy administration.

Varieties of cynicism

Because we understand why these groups are always on the attack, we do not have to look for fancy explanations. What bothers me is the receptiveness of many in the middle class, including key opinion leaders, to the arguments of the opposition.

One explanation is cynicism, several varieties of cynicism. One of the most pernicious is the “weather weather lang yan” attitude. Don’t get excited about corruption in the current administration. If we are patient, and work at getting back into power, we will have our turn. This put a “don’t poison the well we will drink from when it’s our turn” limit to anti-corruption campaigns. It is also the reason why the more powerful politicians until Erap and GMA never went to jail. Anti-corruption initiatives tended to come from the opposition. 

The PNoy administration is the first to make anti-corruption a centerpiece campaign. By the time the next administration comes to power, the “corruption well” will have considerably less “water.”

The richest sources of corruption money, the BIR, DPWH, the PNP and the AFP are several years into their reform programs; reform at the Bureau of Customs is finally underway. Starting with doing away with CIA’s (Congressional Insertion Allocations), a Butch Abad initiative, the PDAF is also history, thanks to the Supreme Court decision.

But corruption is so deeply embedded in our political system that despite all the anti-corruption work that’s being done by this administration, there is still a lot of corruption especially in the mid-to-lower levels of the bureaucracy.

This feeds into another, more widespread form of skepticism, the “everyone is corrupt” form. People don’t make a distinction between the corruption they still see, and corruption at the top, in Malacañang and the Cabinet, which was so prevalent during the long years of the Macapagal-Arroyo administration. 

Since PNoy’s trust level is unassailable, they target members of his Cabinet. Butch Abad is the designated target not just because, as Department of Budget and Management secretary, he is a key gatekeeper for the government’s money, he is close enough to the President that his accusers hope that if they can make their accusations stick, PNoy will be affected. Not incidentally, Abad has been the main architect of many of the anti-corruption reforms of this administration.

Enough has been written to disprove the ridiculous accusation that he is the brains behind Napoles. What needs to be done is to provide enough reason for well-meaning people to break away from their cynicism. 

Terrain of reform

There are reformers, most numerous in civil society and in media, whose skepticism about the administration’s reforms in fact feeds into other forms of cynicism. They do not see that the reform process is not “matuwid na daan” – that reform often takes zigzag turns.

Maybe it is an occupational hazard of civil society advocates to pit the ideal against the practical. If you are actually shaping a specific reform, you have to consider the terrain – the beneficiaries, the enemies, the tactical requirements of the reform process. I think it was Barack Obama who once said that sometimes the ideal becomes the enemy of the good.

As the PDAF cases move from the legal preliminaries to consideration of evidence, the struggle to shape public discourse will intensify. What is at stake is not just whether the accused get convicted (that may take years), but control over discursive terrain as we move closer to the 2016 elections.

The administration candidate will have the advantage of the mantle of anti-corruption reform that will be bestowed by PNoy. VP Binay will have to explain why his closest associates are among the most prominent accused. That will put him in an untenable defensive corner. – Rappler.com

Joel Rocamora is the Secretary of the National Anti-Poverty Commission.