AS A Filipino overseas who loves his homeland, I am puzzled, sad and disenchanted to see our beloved Philippines entrenched in a quagmire and culture of graft and corruption involving government officials, including top legislators who had plundered the nation’s meager coffers and practically go unpunished.
Evidently, even the Supreme Court was not immune from this plague that has devastated and continued to ruin the name and reputation of the Philippines, still tagged as a most corrupt country among nations in the world by international media.
Under the administration of President Benigno S. Aquino III, the Philippines has impressively improved in the global survey of 175 countries from a ranking of number 34 most corrupt in 2012 down to number 85 in 2014, according to Transparency International Corruption Perception Index. While the corruption is evidently less, it is nonetheless still too significant to ignore.
The massive poverty among nearly a third of us Filipinos, the poorest of the poor languishing in the gutter of nothingness, suffering human beings, especially children, who go to bed at night, not only with empty stomachs, but with empty dreams, nightmares, and wake up day after day to a bleak tomorrow and a desolate future.
While it does not take an Einstein to figure out why, it is unfathomable how we, as a society, would allow such poverty, graft and corruption, to flourish unabated, killing every fiber of human decency and pride in each one of us. Where is our compassion towards our marginalized and disenfranchised fellowmen who literally rotting out there?
Observers around the world wonder if the Philippines is a democracy where majority rules. And if so, they ask if this means majority of the Filipinos are also corrupt and without a heart, voting for known corrupt politicians again and again, closing their eyes, allowing this human tragedy to continue decade after decade, fence-sitting or looking the other way while the casualties grow? Some have even concluded that perhaps the Filipinos are simply inhumane, masochistic, or stupid, or all of the above.
Government officials, leaders who, we, the people, have elected into office must be held to a higher standard of the law and, if judged guilty of a crime, especially plunder (whose penalty was death in our constitution before 1986), must be penalized to the fullest extent allowed by law. The higher the office they hold, the greater their accountability and culpability should be.
These plunderers must be put behind bars to serve their full jail term and return the money they stole, and not simply be placed only on house arrest to enjoy all the conveniences of a wealthy home, or on hospital arrest, unless an acute, not chronic, illness ails them. After treatment, they go back to jail.
If the majority of our people, the gigantic force behind the people power of the past, wills it, we can forcefully demand our legislators to put forth a new law disqualifying convicted plunderers, other felons and criminals, from running for office in the government, national, provincial, down to the barangays, and also to enact soonest a Freedom of Information law to help in our battle against graft and corruption in the Philippines.
I have great faith in the Filipino as a whole, so I am hereby making this clarion call enjoining all of us Filipinos to pull out our head from under the sand and look around, and feel and fight for our neglected people and give them hope.
God bless the Philippines!--Philip S. Chua, MD, FACS, FPCS