LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA — And the word of the day is (drumroll)…. Kleptocrat.
That’s right, a word not commonly heard or seen but should really be an everyday word for Filipinos.
Oh, but why is that? Well, they live in a Kleptocracy, that’s why!
Let’s lay down the definition of Kleptocracy (noun): 1. a society or system ruled by people who use their power to steal their country’s resources; 2. a government by people who use their power to steal their country’s resources.
With that established, the topic of this article should now be a little more obvious.
The leaders in a kleptocracy are called kleptocrats. If you’re lucky, you might actually even know some kleptocrats in your own neighborhood! They’re like trash—there’s always some in the gutters.
Have you been watching YouTube lately? Have you tried searching for “Philippine government”, “Mayor Guo”, “PNP”, “Philippine corruption”, “Chinese nationals in the Philippines”, “POGO in the Philippines”, “illegal gambling in the Philippines”, “police moonlighting in the Philippines”, etc.?
I know there may be hundreds more keywords but once you’re on to one, the rest will reveal themselves in strings. That’s how many negative entries there are on YouTube about the country. I feel safe saying negative because almost all are!
And it’s not like foreign countries can’t understand the troubles of the Philippine government or the Filipino people themselves. They understand because almost all of the features you see on there are in English, with some in TagLish. How I wish they were all in Tagalog so the Filipino’s weaknesses, frailties, and dumbness wouldn’t be put on display, and easily understood by the world at large. I’m sorry, but there it is.
Someone told me that not all of it is about corruption. My answer was, “Just relax! Give it time to ripen, and it’ll fall by itself.”
And just like in Mayor Guo’s case, it has come to light that not only could the Philippine Amusement & Gaming Corp. be blamed for the fiasco but now it seems that the Philippine Statistics Authority, too, did its share of corruption. And only God knows how many people within PSA are involved!
And because it holds the very requirements to prove citizenship, that in turn determines whether a person can be issued a passport, own property in the country, or run for public office, it is easy to assume that the Bureau of Immigration may also be involved, to put it mildly!
Does anyone ever get caught for failures just by virtue of command responsibility or incompetence? No! It seems the country does not have good investigators or intelligence operatives, including the National Bureau of Investigation or the myriad agencies that are supposed to know who are committing crimes, especially those that threaten national security. Their inadequacies and failures cannot be demonstrated enough.
Take their inability to find Pastor Quiboloy, for instance, in a country so small, it could literally fit inside the U.S. state of California, with room to spare.
Imagine how it would have been if we were blessed with a country that was just a hair bigger!
Corruption in the country is creating a cesspool of foreign criminals, a haven for fugitives, and a hotbed for spies.
But if we’re so worried about foreigners taking the Filipinos for dummies, they may only be copycatting the Pinoys themselves.
Over the decades, if there’s one thing foreigners have learned about the Philippines, it is that bribes are hardly refused, and is not even considered an insult by even the highly-educated, high-ranking government officials who come from decent families. Imagine the peons!
I once was a military man myself. Pride wasn’t just derived from our mission accomplishments but also from the fact that we never compromised our integrity at any time.
Without integrity, we would have been nothing but shameful blemishes on the flag we served, and the people and nation it stood for.
Recently, two members of the Special Action Force of the PNP, who were assigned in Mindanao, were caught in Manila moonlighting as security escorts for Chinese nationals. These two were supposed to be in Mindanao performing their duties.
What compelled them to moonlight on official government time, and on another island at that? Well, they were paid good money which, in their case, were bribes!
For their superiors to not know they were engaged in this speaks volumes about how they perceive integrity, and command responsibility.
To me, it lowers the value of their ranks, and the prestige of the institution that recruited and trained them.
Act like trash, be trash! They always say men like these are just a few rotten apples, but with the sheer number of instances of malfeasance by these rotten fruits, their percentage among the whole continues to grow ever larger. Sooner or later, if nothing drastic and ruthless is done with/to them, they will ruin the entire lot.
Pinoy-style tends to suggest that nothing can be done with them, and just let them retire eventually (kawawa naman).
The country now has so many government retirees who, by the skin of their teeth, got away with serious crimes (kawawa naman pag nawalan ng retirement).
We get what we sow, I guess.
I am alarmed at the frequency of the occurrence of incidents of corruption and incompetence in the Philippine government. If you are not, then most certainly, you are one of the reasons it is the way it is.
For those like me, who share their opinions and who are appalled by all the corruption that gets prominently carried in the news, we may not be making a difference now, but as our numbers grow, we’ll be nudging the stone a little more. That would be triumph in itself.
The phrase dyed-in-the-wool came from the practice of dying wool to whatever color before it is spun into threads because then the color is not likely to change as it is spun. This means that when done this way, the color stays fast.
To anyone who has reason to care about the Philippines, it would seem that corruption is entrenched in the Filipino way of life, and only tiny, remaining shreds of decency are keeping the corrupt from actually declaring to the Filipino people to “please accept corruption like you accept death.”
Well, it seems now that consent has been given because the corrupt gets away with corruption, and even when they do get convicted, they don’t really fester in jail. In fact, they run for public office!
The Filipino people has a seemingly-insurmountable problem in corruption. There are the dyed-in-the-wool kleptocrats who have corruption in their veins. They’re not likely to change because they won’t ever face the consequences of their wrongdoings. Them getting away with murder is where the next generation of kleptocrats draw their inspiration from.
And so the way it is goes on and on. God help us!
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Author’s email: [email protected]
