Tuesday, December 23, 2008 Carrillo: Billions and billions By Dominador Maphilindo O. Carrillo Penthouse Corner
IF THERE is any area in which the Philippine government has performed on a consistently world class level, it is probably in the field where the world's countries are ranked according to which ones are the most corrupt.
Transparency International prepares an annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) which ranks 180 of the world's 193 countries by combining the results of several respectable independent surveys conducted around the world, with number 1 perceived to be the world's least corrupt and number 180 perceived to be the world's most corrupt country, and grades each country on the basis of a score ranging from 10 (squeaky clean) to zero (highly corrupt).
The 2007 CPI ranked the Philippines as 131st among 180 countries, and received a score of 2.5 out of 10, along with Burundi, Honduras, Iran, Libya, Nepal, and Yemen. In the 2008 CPI, the Philippines slipped further to 141st place and received an even lower score of 2.3. A March 2007 International Herald Tribune article written by Mr. Carlos Conde cites a 2006 report of the United Nations Development Program finding that almost US$2 billion are lost to corruption in the Philippines every year.
Filipino government officials have been equally world class in stealing large amounts of public money. Probably no one beats the achievement, duly recognized in the Guinness Book of World Records, of former president Ferdinand Marcos in this area.
Senator Jovito Salonga believes that Marcos stole billions of dollars from the government. Former Solicitor General Francisco Chavez believes that the Marcos family still has ill-gotten wealth of around US$13.4 billion, aside from several tons of gold bars, deposited in Swiss bank accounts.
Another former president, Joseph Estrada, was convicted by the Sandiganbayan of the crime of plunder, which ordered the forfeiture in favor of the government several of his assets, including the amounts of P542.701 million from his bank accounts (plus interest) and P189 million from the Jose Velarde bank accounts (plus interest). A Sandiganbayan sheriff eventually found intact in Pres. Estrada's name a bank account containing about P1.1 Billion Pesos and other assets worth another billion pesos. We have seen high ranked officers of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police -- ironically, they were controllers of their respective agencies -- caught whisking away from the country ridiculously large amounts of the very funds they were supposed to protect.
Clearly, when we talk about corruption in the Philippines at this time, we are talking about billions and billions of taxpayers' money lost. In the 1950's and 60's, they said public money was being looted by the "millions". Now, "millions" has become passé; we're talking about "billions" being stolen. (I could almost hear "trillions" knocking at the door in the next few decades.) Jean Paul Getty, an American billionaire who used to be the world's richest man, once said: "If you can count your money, you don't have a billion dollars." I disagree.
Billions and billions may be mind-boggling numbers extremely difficult to imagine, but they are nonetheless still numbers, and therefore quantifiable. One of my all-time favorite writers, Carl Sagan, the title of whose book, "Billions and Billions," I have borrowed for this article, explains the difference between a million, a billion, and a trillion: "A million is a thousand thousand, or a one followed by six zeros; a billion is a thousand million, or a one followed by nine zeros; and a trillion is a thousand billion (or equivalently, a million million), which is a one followed by 12 zeros."
To imagine the staggering amount of money lost to corruption or stolen by our beloved former presidents, it will be helpful to use by analogy the calculations made by Carl Sagan about the counting of billions. If we count one dollar every second non-stop for 24 hours each day, we can count a million dollars in 12 days and a billion dollars in 32 years.
Thus, if I steal a billion dollars (or pesos) from our government (assuming there is still any money left after all the stealing that has been going on), I could still count my money -- but it will take me 32 years to count all of it, assuming I didn't sleep, counted non-stop for 32 years, and most importantly, did not forget when I had left off before falling asleep, in which case I would either have to kill myself or start all over again. Since I would definitely need rest periods of 12 hours a day, it would take me 64 years to count a billion dollars (or pesos).
Having said that, shouldn't we punish all government thieves by having them sit inside their jail cells every day and actually make them count, but not spend, at a rate of one peso per second, all the millions, billions, and soon, trillions, of money they've stolen from us? Now, that would be fun.
