Shortly before Christmas some four months later, I received a call from the supposed processors of my papers. They felt sorry for me and wanted to help me out, so they would accept whatever documentation I had. Incidentally, as it was Christmas, could I contribute to their Christmas party? In my relief I was generous. Yes, I’ll give a lechon, a whole roast pig, a Philippine delicacy. Not enough for a big department? How about two lechon? No, I needed to pay Pesos30,000 in cash. I had returned to Manila after many years overseas, still full of idealism. No, I was not going to contribute to corruption, not even Pesos100 to a traffic policeman. For if we are corrupt in small things, where will we stop? This idealism would be sorely tested, however, for if we do not participate, how do we survive? But if I gave 30,000 Pesos, would it encourage my Christmas party organisers to ask for 40,000 Pesos next time? If I play with fire because I have no realistic options, how do I keep it in control?
Faced with this dilemma, I decided to shut my eyes, and as friends always said, “go with the flow”. I remembered that, in my younger days, when I briefly worked at Bank of America’s South and Southeast Asia Regional Office as corporate communications and public relations coordinator, these petty “give aways” and “coffee money” were under the budget of the administration department. At the Asian Development Bank, there was a Filipino who took care of the release of the duty-free imported cars of the foreign professional staff, and he was given small discretionary funds. I therefore called my brother who had big businesses needing government approvals and asked him for help. That solved the problem and I never asked him what he or any of his staff did. Don’t fight if you know you cannot win.
My father worked for the Philippine Commonwealth Government in the 1930s. Before he died in the late 1980s, he told me he felt sorry for the future generations as younger Filipinos seemed to have lost their sense of integrity. I was away from the country for much of the time, but each time I came back, corruption seemed to have progressed from bad to worse. What had happened? In the intervening years, it appeared that corruption had become institutionalised as its practice became ever more endemic. Honesty and integrity seemed to have lost their value in the hierarchy of morality among Filipinos. I wondered if this were truly the case or just my own perception.
How does corruption develop? And what do pundits mean when they say corruption has been institutionalised? An institution is established for a specific purpose: to provide a structure by which to service a felt need. Obvious examples are churches, schools, banks. A bank has a structure with systems and procedures, with rules and regulations. If you are to take out a loan, you must fulfil certain requirements and must follow certain procedures. These sets of rules are quite explicit. If you need a secured loan, you have to have collateral. You present to the bank an asset you wish to mortgage. Similarly, if the government were to create a functioning institution, it would have to define a set of rules and regulations, which everyone would have to follow. It is the job of the state to create an environment where strong and beneficial institutions can flourish.
I once went for a working visit to a couple of countries in Africa to provide advice on institution building for women in management positions. I was told that, when someone wanted to get something done, they didn’t know where to go. There were momentary “heads of departments” and members in decision-making positions. However, each one had a different opinion on what the regulations were, so that different functionaries would articulate different requirements. Because of these confusions, the processing of necessary documents took an inordinate amount of time. What would happen if, as was often the case, functionaries changed from one day to the next? In a vicious cycle, the process would need to be repeated all over again. This was more than a waste of time and effort as, due to this status quo, structures were never strengthened.
Institutions are like people—in order to get strong, they need exercise. It is in the repeated exercise of the institution’s operations that the winnowing of redundancy, and the consequent simplification of procedures, can eventually ensue—so necessary for productive endeavours. A lack of properly functioning institutions leaves needs unserviced. If you were to set up a business in a country with immature institutions catering to an identified need, for example, you could be faced with redundant requirements, needless forms to complete, and pointless permissions to obtain. If that happened to banks, people would go elsewhere for their financial needs, and in an extreme scenario, banks as we know them would eventually cease to exist.
In the shorter term, however, how do you get something done without the unnecessary and time-wasting procedural pitfalls so often found in immature institutions? It has been argued that in countries where institutions have not yet been exercised enough for them to grow solid and strong, the practice of corruption could, indeed, bypass the voluminous and contradictory red tape that would otherwise have inhibited productivity. In other words, for short-term survival—if indeed it becomes an issue of survival—should you sacrifice long-term gains? Or do you do a balancing act? How?
Historically, corruption was not always against the interest of a country’s development. For centuries, rampant corruption had happened in the affairs of great nations and they are now generally none the worse for it. During the 19th century, for example, young America did not look towards the more mature Europe, but rather towards the more pioneering Western horizons. Indeed, it was not called the “Wild West” for nothing. The treaties with the Native Americans (that would be broken again and again on the part of the US government), the exodus of settlers to every new western state, the great riches which came from the discovery and mining of gold and silver, the construction of railways from coast to coast—all these would not have succeeded had it not been for the corrupt practices of many. Indeed, young America would not have been transformed into a great world leader in less than a hundred years!
In short, corruption is endemic in young nations, when institutions have not yet been properly nurtured. This happened not only in the young America but even in the later-to-become incorruptible British civil service. As Robert Clive, an 18th century commander-in-chief of British India, was alleged to have said, “Given my opportunities, I stand astonished at my own moderation.”
When institutions fail to develop within an allotted time, however, and remain stunted, the citizenry can demand revolutionary changes, not always with desirable results. Before a new order will have been established, uprisings often bring chaos and a great deal of suffering. The common practice in medieval Europe of selling papal indulgences brought about the Reformation movement when people finally said, “Enough”. This, in turn, was one of the major factors that caused the Thirty Years War when about one third of the population of Western Europe died before the region would find a new stability. Was it worth the sacrifice? In his book World Order, Henry Kissinger writes that the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years War, would usher in a new and constructive world order, many of the tenets of which are being observed to this day.
In the mid-1980s, Filipinos likewise used the slogan Basta ya, tama na (stop now, enough already) when more than a million people took to the streets, demanding the resignation of President Ferdinand Marcos because of unbridled corruption and the public perception that the governing leadership was sliding towards totalitarianism. The resignation of President Marcos, however, did not bring about an end to corruption. It was because the new leadership did not initiate the tedious process of rebuilding. Mrs. Aquino had the supreme mandate to introduce painful changes, but she did not have the wherewithal, or perhaps the moral courage, to provide new structures where new institutions could grow.
In the vacuum created by the departure of Mr. Marcos, dysfunctional institutions continued to operate, or were re-established, so much so that many called the Cory Aquino presidency the period of the restoration of the old order.
Mitigating Corruption
The social ps
ychologist Leon Festinger, in his theory about cognitive dissonance, posits that we can truly speak of attitude change only when the three elements in the change process are in harmony: these three elements are Thinking, Feeling, and Acting. We are comfortable only when what we think matches with how we feel and both match with what we do. Otherwise, we will always be conflicted within ourselves.
Such would be the case if a situation occurred where one of these three elements had been pulled out of sync so that it became misaligned. To resolve the situation, we would subconsciously struggle to retain the old psychological comfort by pulling back in the element that had been pulled out. Or, we could reach a new comfort level, by aligning the two remaining elements with the one that had been pulled out so that all three components would be “whole” again, so to speak. If that happens, and a new consonance of Thinking, Feeling, and Acting has been formed, we can then talk about a changed attitude.
My sister-in-law smokes an average of a pack of cigarettes per day. Yet, in spite of all the information given to her on how smoking affects her health, she refuses to give it up. (This new element—Information— is supposed to elicit a new way of thinking.) So she has come up with reasons as to why it is still fine to smoke. She has persuaded herself that it takes years and years to develop cancer and, as none in her family has had cancer, the chances are she would die of another cause before developing cancer—and anyway, who wants to live forever? What is life if it is not to be lived? In thinking that way, she has retained cognitive consonance. She can comfortably smoke and enjoy the activity. She has rejected the new information.
What does this all mean when you want to change people’s attitudes? The shortest route is to change one element and pull it out of sync, pulling it strongly enough and holding it long enough so that it drags the other components of the change process and forms a new alignment. This is often done by first eliminating choice so that you are working towards compliance, and in due course, out of habit, compliance will develop into commitment.
When I first left Negros, I noticed that people there did not want to queue, each one wanted to be served first. I hated to check in at the airport counter because everybody would crowd in front of the counter, extending their hands with their tickets, calling for the attention of the clerk. It was chaotic. When I came back in the early 2000s, however, and went to check in for a flight out of Manila, I was pleased to note that the airport management had put ropes to force people into single file, perhaps in imitation of what they had observed in other countries. This structure—the roped enclosures—impacts on the Acting element, enforcing it through coercion.
After checking in, I went to the rest room where there were no ropes. I was pleasantly surprised to see people queuing, although admittedly, instead of a single line waiting for one of the cubicles to open, they would form separate, shorter queues in front of each cubicle, oftentimes blocking the way of the person coming out. Still, I thought that was a big improvement and I wondered whether this was a compromise behaviour learned from queuing in a roped enclosure. Would that this were also applied to our traffic situation. Currently, many still try to cut in front of the car ahead of them as everyone wants to be directly by the traffic lights before the colours change, causing a bottleneck and yet heavier traffic. Perhaps we are still waiting for the authorities to place road cones separating each traffic lane, in order to force motorists to form a queue. This would not only ease congestion, but in due course, could teach us some discipline.
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Slogans are meant to change feelings. Ang bayan ko mahal ko (my country, my love) states a popular poster. This is meant to elicit feelings of patriotism, thereby pulling the “Feeling” element out of the old attitude consonance. If the pull is hard enough, it can result in actions geared towards more community and national involvement.
It has been proven, however, that it is in changes in structure, which suspend all choices available to us, that is the quickest mode to behaviour change, as it feeds directly into attitude change. This, however, also causes the most resistance to change.
If you apply the idea of cognitive dissonance in order to change attitudes, you could mitigate instances of corruption, and in the process, reduce its usefulness to the individual. Properly guided, the use of this idea will weaken corruption. The proposed use of computers related to the issuance of traffic violation tickets, for example, will standardise the process, resulting in a change in structure that could promote new behaviour patterns. So would the lengthening of the expiry of drivers’ licenses. I am pleased to hear that drivers’ licenses only need now to be renewed every five instead of three years as was previously the case (I ask: why not make the expiry even longer?) I also look forward to the time when government offices would no longer be overstaffed, when relatively minor documents no longer need several layers of redundant approvals, when you no longer need to notarise agreements of small consequence, when each office is staffed by civil servants who are paid adequate salaries, and when police officers are given living wages. A friend adds: customs officials in the airport should have desks with no drawers, and their offices should be constructed so that there is minimal privacy, with remote cameras attached to their work stations whenever possible. Perhaps, if I buy another small property, I could even get a piece of paper where all the requirements for transferring the title to my name are written down by a person of authority so I don’t have to keep going back to the Registry of Deeds to get them piecemeal. These simple structural changes will then result in less opportunities for corruption. Coupled with more efficiency, could the Philippines then perhaps improve its international standing on the Ease of Doing Business Register? In 2016, the World Bank ranked the Philippines 103rd out of 189 countries surveyed.
Who can effect these changes? It is commonly asserted that, in an organisation, it is management who can build a new culture. Likewise, it is management who have the power to change or create structures: the heads of sections, of departments or divisions, or the CEO in centralised organisations. It is unfortunate that although many Filipinos might disagree with me, it is President Duterte himself who undermines the very institutions that he is supposed to be nurturing. For the purpose of stamping out illicit drug use, he has weakened Philippine institutions geared for the purpose of administering justice and the rule of law, two of the most important institutions necessary for the maturation of any society.
In summary, condemning corruption in the hope that it will change the outlook of the corrupt is like telling an addicted smoker to stop smoking because it is bad for their health. Instead, corruption can be addressed by respecting institutional rules so that institutions can grow. Thus can corruption be mitigated. Filipinos are supremely capable of building strong institutions. Anyone who doubts that need only look at the Catholic Church in the Philippines, or the institution of the Filipino family for that matter.
Conversely, we are also capable of supplanting institutions, as any institution that does not fulfill a social need will wither and die. This means that we can build institutions with unambiguous, realistic, and implementable sets of rules, not only for a select few, but for all constituencies. Let us stop complaining about corruption and instead talk of building institutions. Strong institutions inhibit corruption just as corruption’s major dysfunction is that it destroys institutions. Like a virus, corruption can then spread from one sphere of activity to another, ultimately developing into an attitude that permeates our daily lives and erodes the country’s moral compass.
Part Two
Photo Captions
Plate 1
a) Filipinos love to celebrate life—eating, singing, and dancing. Sensual and highly extroverted, they enjoy going out and being with their barkadas. This photo shows beneficiaries of an NGO, which gives support to street children. The children are showing off their dancing prowess to guests during a Christmas party.
b) A barkada is a group of friends with common inte
rests. As interests vary and friends are numerous, a Filipino usually has quite a number of barkadas, with each barkada reserved for one favourite activity. Hence, one barkada can consist of old classmates, another one perhaps for a common hobby such as playing basketball, still another for bible study, and so on. Below is a travel barkada.
c) When my husband was new in the Philippines, he would observe that children in the provinces would follow him around curiously, commenting, “Americano, Americano”. They didn’t seem to understand when he would tell them he wasn’t “Americano”. To them any Caucasian was “Americano”. This seems to happen less frequently nowadays as people become more accustomed to foreign faces.
When Turtles Come Home Page 13
