Saturday, April 14, 2007 Carvajal: But how will things get better? By Orlando P. Carvajal Break Point
IT'S the easiest way to make one self look good and that is to make The other person look bad. In Philippine politics, muck raking has been the strategy of choice for many candidates. True to form, many from the present crop of candidates have done nothing more than denounce the evils of their opponents.
This does not help us the least bit because it simply belabors the obvious. We actually know better than politicians who live in air castles that there is graft and corruption in government and homelessness, hunger, ill health and illiteracy among millions of Filipinos. We do not need to be told that these evils exist. We need candidates to tell us exactly what they will do to rid the nation of these evils.
Former vice president Tito Guingona, with his open letter to the Filipino people last Wednesday, did nothing but beat a dead horse. You would think that after denouncing all the evils of the present administration he would end his letter by telling us what his party will do to wipe out graft and corruption, for instance. No such luck. Instead he told us what we should do in the face of corruption. He told us to denounce corrupt government officials. He actually had the gall to pass the burden on to us.
But isn’t that what we have been doing, denounce? Isn’t the problem the fact that politicians once in power stop denouncing and start to protect those who raise campaign funds for them and cover up their trail of graft? Why doesn’t Guingona swear now that his group will not protect the corrupt among them?
Look at the lamp post scam. It has been denounced. But as usual, not only with this administration but with all administrations in the past, only the tentacles are cut off. The head is safely covered up by layers of brute political power, tucked away safely in another ministry. Yet it is pretty obvious to many that a scam of this magnitude could not have been done without the nod from the very top.
What the public needs to cast a wise vote is for candidates to declare their commitment to a specific action program to erase all the evils they are denouncing. It is for civil society to denounce evils in government, and we have done enough denouncing, while it is for candidates to tell us how things will get any better once they get elected.
We must vote for a candidate that is not just against an evil in society but clearly and unequivocally for something that will erase that evil. To vote wisely we must not forget that many candidates are not running to stop corruption but to be the ones to benefit from corruption. Or else why are they not telling us how they will make things any better?
