In His Fight Against Corruption, Time is Not on the President’s Side

By Joey Salgado

Imagine being told by your closest advisers that you can turn things around. The midterm poll fiasco? Forget that. You need a reset to stop your survey numbers from sinking deeper than the Philippine Trench. How? Let’s shame the corrupt members of Congress, even, or especially, your cousin the Speaker and your allies. They’ll grin and bear it, bless their thick hides. Let’s skewer the contractors and public works officials as well. Be the people’s voice against corruption. And just you wait and see. Your survey numbers will fly.

Well, the latest Pulse Asia survey came out last week. The President’s numbers didn’t fly. They fell off the roof.

The obvious conclusion, impermeable to spin, is that the anti-corruption pivot, meant to prop up the President as anti-corruption crusader, is a dismal failure.

According to Pulse Asia, disapproval and distrust were the “plurality sentiments” expressed during the survey conducted from Sept. 27 to 30, just days after thousands poured into the streets to protest corruption in the Marcos administration involving the unholy alliance of legislators, contractors, and public works officials.

The public is not only disappointed but angry. They’re disappointed and angry at the callous display of wealth acquired through corruption. They’re disappointed and angry over the President’s failure to curb corruption during his first three years in office. And they don’t trust his administration can win the fight against corruption.

To think that in June, before the “shame” speech in Congress and the power point-aided bombshell of a press conference on flood control corruption, the President’s numbers were actually showing signs of recovery.

After a divisive midterms, the public, already dedma to corruption tales spun by social media partisans during the campaign period, had moved on to the more pressing concern of making ends meet, most of them surviving on barely decent wages. Politics was again left to pundits, trolls, and operators.

Had the President pursued the path of seriously focusing on jobs, food, and improving public services, his efforts could have been better appreciated. This could have been packaged as an honest reset, with a revamped Cabinet, clear policy directions, concrete results, and a laser focus on making the economy work for the people in the remaining years of his term. There will be detractors, of course. But he could hold his head high and say he was still able to make a difference.

But some advisers probably had this political itch that needed to be scratched, an agenda that needed to be pushed.

So rather than focus on economic gains that can be achieved through patience and attrition, they shifted the President’s focus to politics, where the risks are high, but manageable in their thinking, but the gains are also high. By exposing corruption in flood control projects, the President was placed on a moral high ground that turned out to be made of mud. It also made him a very visible target.

Signaling

Pulse Asia president Ronnie Holmes, in an interview, says inflation has always been one of the top urgent concerns of the public. The last time corruption was among the top three urgent concerns was during the Arroyo administration. That the public now sees corruption as one of the top urgent concerns, second only to inflation, “…can be attributed to the signaling effect of the president, to emphasize that corruption is an issue.”

With public sentiment approximating that of a lynch mob, the President and his team needs to find a way to get out of the hole they dug for themselves.

Following the survey results and an unprecedented joint statement from the country’s major business groups urging him to take decisive actions against “historic, massive and unprecedented corruption,” the President acknowledged that the campaign he mounted is “hard” and “painful,” but “worth it.”

He forgot to mention the word “long.”

With the new Ombudsman already declaring that the first batch of cases will soon be filed before the Sandiganbayan, the anti-corruption campaign is entering a territory that is, theoretically, outside the reach of the executive. The courts operate on a different playbook, one that leans exclusively on evidence and puts the burden of proof on government prosecutors. A trial could take years, if not decades. Unless it resorts to the same coercive maneuvers employed by the previous administration against its harshest critics, the administration has no option but to play by these rules. It needs to have airtight cases against key personalities. But if the tactical objective is to project toughness, the administration needs to send someone to jail on a non-bailable offense at the soonest time possible, the bigger the names, the better it will please a public out for blood.

“The administration has to really take this as a signal, they have to do more," says Pulse Asia’s Holmes. Time, however, is not on the President’s side.

This article also appears in Rappler