Emerging for a press conference in Malacañang last Monday, Mr. Romulo Neri was suddenly very voluble, apparently immensely pleased with the rationalization of himself that he has come up with, to wit, that his actions in permitting “grossly overpriced” government procurement contracts characterized by “massive kickbacks” were justified so that he could remain in government and reform it from within. Ah, that’s some load of bovine manure that you are trying to dump on the public, Mr. Neri. Shame on you.
I think that Mr. Neri – who kept signing off on patently anomalous deals because they had influential “political sponsors” – should just admit that he finds the thought of being excluded from the walkways of power so horrible that he has lost all sense of moral proportion. He should spare us, please, the diagrams and email blasts that try to paint him as a crusading knight trying to hold back the “oligarchic” forces of darkness that would unconscionably steal from the struggling poor of this country. That line collapses with the revelation of his friend and erstwhile consultant, Engineer Rodolfo Lozada Jr., that Mr. Neri asked him, as a condition for testifying, to “raise patriotic money from those ready to help him have a new source of livelihood” in a post-Arroyo government. Patriotic money? That makes Mr. Neri positively mercenary. What makes him pathetic is that, while he cannot even deny outright having said (or thought) that Mrs. Arroyo is “evil”, he still tries to curry her favor by saying weakly that he doesn’t remember having said so.
It is, actually, incredible that Mr. Neri does not seem to realize that even more problematic for us than the “oligarchs” he says he is focused on are the supposed professionals like himself who do not have the moral backbone to do what is right by the public they swore to serve and, instead, pathetically rationalize what is perniciously and wickedly wrong. That oligarchs and rent-seeking businessmen will try to obtain from government – by fair means or foul – deals profitable to them and disadvantageous to the public at large must be a given: this is what men of immoderate greed do, and such vulgar men exist in every society. But, the role of public servants like Mr. Neri is, precisely, to prevent such deals from taking place and to see to it that the public interest is protected from any would-be plunderers.
In Mr. Neri’s case, his function as economic planning chief was specifically to determine which projects would advance the public interest and which ones would not. He was supposed to be the public’s sentry at the gate, but I suspect that he quickly forgot that he was supposed to hold the gate closed against pillaging bandidos when he found that he enjoyed it more if he held the gate open so that the rampaging cowboys could pat his head as they galloped past with all the treasures they filched from a now unprotected public.
Mr. Neri’s diagram about the “oligarchs’ control of the Philippine economy and President Arroyo’s dependence on the oligarchs, the military, and local government units for her political survival” is, frankly, sophomoric and dated. What he appears to have only now discovered has been the situation in this country since its independence and this lecture has been given to numerous generations of students of history, political science, business, and economics. But that situation (if I might lecture Mr. Neri) has evolved over the years. To cite one major source of change, globalization and open borders have already diminished greatly the power of any local oligarchies where markets are generally free of artificial barriers to entry. But, artificial barriers to entry continue to be created by government bureaucrats who are actively bought and “captured” by vested interests. These captured bureaucrats are also the main gapangeros in rigging public bidding exercises for any juicy government procurement.
To cite another change, although large legitimate business enterprises continue to be an important source of campaign contributions for political candidates, the concededly much more important source today of such contributions is the undocumented cash generated by illegal activities like the jueteng, drugs, and smuggling rackets. Thus, the clear and present danger for us is not a political structure controlled by legitimate business enterprises, but one controlled by jueteng operators, drug dealers, and smugglers.
Thus is government our real problem. Government functionaries, like the disappointing Mr. Neri, allow themselves to be captured by politicos and their cronies and used as instruments for furthering private interests. This makes them dangerous enemies of the people because they pretend to be looking out for our interests while helping thieves pick our pockets. The problem of our government is that even career government bureaucrats who do not now participate in such thievery keep silent and thus passively allow such goings-on. Since career bureaucrats cannot be fired from their civil service jobs anyway – they can only be put in the “freezer”, their powers clipped – when they refuse to cooperate and blow the whistle on irregularities, it would seem that the lure of power today trumps any moral imperatives. This is such a tragedy.
Moral thresholds are, I think, at the heart of the issue regarding the level of corruption in our society in general and the amount of plunder going on in the Arroyo government in particular. The moral threshold of Mr. Lozada was crossed by the sheer garapalan of the National Broadband deal. Mr. Neri, by obviously enjoying his TV-filmed walk with Mrs. Arroyo and her Cabinet, is telling us that his line is nowhere near being crossed. He has selected a side and it is certainly not the side of the Filipino public.
The great political economist Adam Smith wrote, referring to those in government, that “Such people, as they themselves produce nothing, are all maintained by the produce of other men’s labour.” I wonder if Mr. Neri understands the meaning of this and comprehends the harm his misplaced moral threshold is doing us all.
