Corruption's faces

PINOY KASI

Corruption’s faces
By Michael Tan
Inquirer
Last updated 01:59am (Mla time) 12/15/2006

Published on Page A15 of the December 15, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

IT SOUNDED almost like a joke, but my father says it’s true. This story he picked up on one of the Chinese cable channels’ newscasts.

A man had failed in a suicide attempt because the rat poison he used turned out to be adulterated. His family was jubilant and bought some alcoholic beverages to celebrate. But fate works in strange ways: The liquor was adulterated, too, and accomplished what the despondent man had failed to do with the rat poison.

My father isn’t quite sure if this happened in Taiwan or in mainland China, but his point is that corruption is so rampant now that people’s lives are being put on the line. Every day now there are reports on Chinese cable television about scams with consumer goods, including some that kill. The most disturbing one I heard some time back was about adulterated milk powder that killed several children.

I’m sharing these stories partly to warn readers about some of those cheap imports coming in, especially from China. Some -- like, would you believe, P400 cassette recorders -- don’t pose major dangers except that you would probably realize, when the product breaks down after a few weeks, that you’ve just thrown away money on an expensive toy. I have no doubts that China will eventually produce top-quality durable consumer goods, but right now, production standards are abysmally low in many manufacturing sectors. Even worse, those already low standards are often violated because of corruption. I’m afraid many Chinese electronic products are just too shoddy right now, and some can pose very real risks, for example Christmas lights that easily overheat and short-circuit.

Then there are all these food products, many with the most outrageous health claims. I often check out the ones my parents buy or get as gifts and really, many aren’t even worth the packaging. I’ve found insects and mold inside, and joke that at least the insects provide some nutrition, considering that many of these products are junk, with too much flour, sugar or salt.

Riding on the craze for traditional medicine, we’re also getting many Chinese medicinal products with claims of being “organic” or “natural.” Again, I’d be very careful here. If you can’t read Chinese, you won’t know that some of these products contain quite powerful and dangerous Western drugs. I’ve found cold remedies with tranquilizers and antibiotics, and “pain killers” with steroids. These are the “safer” medicines in the sense that they at least have the ingredients printed out. I shudder to think of all the other health products that aren’t as straightforward. Again, there are laws that regulate the production of medicines, including a prohibition on the mixing of traditional and Western ingredients, but the corruption’s so rampant the laws have little meaning.

Respectable

I started off with China because we tend to get so depressed thinking of corruption in the Philippines. It’s bad here, no doubt, but corruption is found everywhere and its adverse consequences know no borders as substandard products enter global trade.

But I did want to get now to corruption’s faces. The word “corrupt” makes us think of sinister-looking characters, operating in dark corners. In reality, and this is what is so terrifying, corruption’s many faces are often quite benign, even pleasant. There are the ever respectable businessmen or businesswomen with their briefcases and laptops, but who have perfected the art of paying off whoever needs to be paid off. The goods that are dumped here have gone through so many layers of corruption, from the regulatory agencies in China to local customs officials.

We think, too, of corruption, as being confined to “poor” countries like our own, forgetting the multibillion dollar scandals of Enron and America’s corporate world. Talk about respectable.

We think of fly-by-night factories packaging contaminated milk powder in some seedy building. But what about those huge multinational companies that sued our Department of Health after it came up with stricter regulations on advertising and promotion of milk formula? It is corruption, too -- and of the worst kind -- when you bully Third World governments.

Family

Transparency International just came out with their latest annual ratings of corruption in the world, and this year, they also released results of a Global Corruption Barometer, based on surveys in several countries. In the Philippines, 16 percent of respondents said they paid bribes in the past 12 months. (Only 16 percent? I thought. It should have been higher.)

But the figure reminds us that corruption has many faces -- including our own. And the corrupted? The police, Transparency International said, are the most “vulnerable.” I use quotes there because it’s hard to think of those pot-bellied scoundrels as vulnerable. Let me catch myself there: Yes, many of them do fit our stereotypes of the corrupt but think, too, of the last time you were held up by some policeman or traffic enforcer. They can actually be quite amiable, and ever so polite, full of “po” and “sir” and “ma’am” as they pull you over to the curb. More “po” and “sir” crop up as they accuse you of having violated some rule. At some point, you finally ask what you need to do. Oh, but don’t they look so innocent when they go, “Kayo po...”

Psychologists talk about cognitive restructuring as a way of controlling your emotions. You’re indignant over the corruption, so you try to calm yourself down by looking at that face, and trying to not to think of him (or, increasingly now, her) as low life. And that’s what’s so horrifying: you look at that face and you realize he or she looks just like many people we love: a child, a sibling, even a parent.

That is what is so disconcerting: It’s a battle against time. Do we get to the point where there will be a total disconnect between what we say and do at home and in schools, and what happens out there in the real world? We can talk our heads off about corrupt politicians but early on, our children will pick up, catching on to all the little transactions in homes and offices, around permits and licenses and taxes and traffic violations.

I want to end on a hopeful note. I know some national government agencies and local governments are trying hard to streamline procedures and bureaucracies to cut some of the bottlenecks that invite corruption. I have many friends, too, who try extra hard to avoid those little “facilitating” transactions for permits and licenses, payments, even if it means a delay, say, in getting the house renovated or in getting a business started. It’s not easy, but we need to think again of faces. Do we want someday to find someone we know, gambling with people’s lives for a fee, and doing this with so much aplomb, so much graciousness?