A Broken Culture? The Government (Part 1)

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about James Fallows‘ twenty-three year old description of the Philippines today, “A Broken Culture.” It’s important because there’s another election around the corner, a new round a people promising an end to poverty, but the outlook is the same. Fallows argued, and was right, that the end martial law under Marcos and return to democratic rule under (recently deceased) Aquino wasn’t going to fix the underlying problems of the Philippines despite the optimism at the time.

All in all, I think I agree with Fallows. But it isn’t just a broken culture. It’s a broken economy, a broken polity, and a fractured state. I unfortunately agree that these problems seem as intractable today as they did then. I want to take a different approach than Fallows and instead of looking at what’s wrong with the Philippines, I want to look at what’s right and ask why it’s not working. The most frustrating thing about the Philippines is that it seems like it has all the right pieces when each part is viewed in isolation, but the whole of society and the polity just isn’t moving like it should.

First, let’s look at the government.

Standard Operating Procedures

Hera’s father works for the local government and was telling us yesterday about “SOP” – Standard Operating Procedure. It’s the term for executive-level corruption in the Philippines. SOP is the jacking up of the price of government projects by contractors who then pass the extra cash on to government officials. I was told last night by the Mayor’s speech writer that any project more than 20 million pesos (about $500,000) gets 30% or more SOP. The money gets spread down from presidents, governors, mayors and down to barangay (neighborhood/sub-district) chiefs. It’s Standard Operating Procedure because no one needs to ask for it, it just comes. There effectively is no non-corrupt executive leader in the Philippines. They don’t need to do anything other than do their jobs building roads, bridges, schools and hospitals and the dirty money flows right into their hands.

China has corruption too, of course, but it’s different.