'Lagay'

PINOY KASI

'Lagay'
By Michael Tan
Inquirer
Last updated 08:28am (Mla time) 12/20/2006

Published on Page A15 of the December 20, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

Can corruption be measured?

Realistically, you can't expect corruption to be surveyed like the Gross National Product, with people going around trying to get the total peso or dollar value of bribes that are paid. So, Transparency International, a group based in Germany, uses the next best thing, which are perceptions. Its best known survey is the Corruption Perceptions Index, which brings together ratings mainly from expatriate business people. The index is released with a ranking of countries.

Less well known is TI's Global Corruption Barometer, which looks more at how corruption affects ordinary people. The 2006 Barometer is particularly interesting because it probes into what TI calls "petty bribery": How often does the common tao pay bribes, and to whom. In addition, TI asked how citizens perceive their government's anti-corruption efforts.

The latest TI results were released on Dec. 7. One figure worth sharing: 31 percent of Filipinos surveyed felt that the government's fight against corruption was "not effective." That's the good news. Another 23 percent said the government did not fight at all. That's the bad news. Here's more to make your day: 24 percent felt the government did not fight corruption, but actually encouraged it.

Curious about other findings, I went into the TI website (www.ti.de), downloaded the reports and thought I'd share some additional insights I gained by looking at the Barometer.

Sectors
Before going into the Barometer itself, let me talk a bit more about the Corruption Perceptions Index or CPI. The CPI is useful because of the way it ranks countries in the world, but the rankings haven't been changing too drastically over the years, and that makes me worry at times. It's almost as if we're frozen in those rankings, doomed forever to remain corrupt. It seems almost like some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, where bribers (in this case, the business people) and bribe-takers (that's us) begin to believe that Filipinos, together with the Indonesians and Vietnamese, are "by nature" the most corrupt among Asians.

The Barometer is more useful in the way it actually surveys men and women on the street, probing into how corruption affects their daily lives. The one limitation the Barometer has is that they could not include countries like China and Vietnam, where ordinary citizens may be less willing to participate in a survey asking them about what they think of government. (Those two countries are included in the Corruption Perceptions Index since expatriate business people can speak out.)

How widespread then is bribe-paying? The TI survey asked people: "In the past 12 months, have you or anyone living in your household paid a bribe in any form?" Globally, the "yes" response was about 9 percent, ranging from a low of 1 percent for Singapore to 60 percent in Morocco. In the Asia-Pacific region, the average was 7 percent. The highest bribe-paying figures in the region came from Pakistan (15 percent), the Philippines (16 percent) and Indonesia (18 percent).

TI also asked people to rate corruption in various sectors and institutions, from a 1 ("not at all corrupt") to 6 ("extremely corrupt"). Here's how Filipinos ranked the sectors and here, I'm going to name them from least to most corrupt: religious bodies (2.1), media (2.5), NGOs (2.6), medical services (2.9), utilities (2.9), education (3.0), registry and permit systems (3.2), legal system/judiciary (3.4), the military (3.4), tax revenue (3.7), political parties (3.8), parliament/legislature (3.9), police (3.9).

The ratings came very close to my own expectations, with some cheering for the low corruption ratings given to the media, NGOs and medical services. In Eastern European countries for example, the medical sector is perceived to be very corrupt.

On the other hand, we do suffer in the area of licenses and permits, the courts, the lawmakers and the law enforcers, which is just about everything else. We may shrug our shoulders about the bribes paid to get permits, but when corruption affects building permits, we're talking here about many lives being put at risk. Think, too, of the people behind the wheels of trucks and buses, with a license, yes, but never having been tested on driving skills or knowledge of traffic rules.

Asking why
The Barometer should get us thinking not just about the impact of corruption but, even more importantly, why we have corruption. We hear reasons like "lack of values" and "low government salaries," with exhortations to pray more and increase government salaries.

The Barometer helps to alert us to other facets of corruption. We see bottlenecks in the permits and licenses sector, and here I wonder at times if it's corruption alone. For Juan and Juana de la Cruz, just filling out a government form can be most intimidating. The solution? They look for friends of neighbors of relatives of someone working in City Hall to help out. And if they don't know anyone, then look for the fixers.

Bureaucracies and bureaucratic procedures feed into corruption in many ways. Even the tediousness of the procedure, for a civil servant, can lead to corruption, with the way it numbs the civil servants, working on the same forms day in and day out. Eventually, they end up calloused, and develop a sense of entitlement for little gifts (especially around Christmas), which grows as they climb the bureaucratic ladder.

I'm hoping some of my anthropology graduate students will eventually look into the anatomy of lagay. I wonder at times if Filipinos even equate lagay with bribe, which is why social scientists will need to probe more as well into other terms such as "pang-merienda," "pamasahe" (transportation) even "pang-sigarilyo." I wouldn't dismiss them totally as euphemisms for bribes; they also carry a sense of entitlement and reciprocity on the part of the briber and the bribe-taker. In cultures like our own, there's also that gray area between gifts and bribes, which is why the Civil Service Commission has to warn government people every Christmas not to even say "Merry Christmas," lest this be misinterpreted as a solicitation.

I get exasperated with explanations for corruption like "lack of values" because in many cases, corruption is fueled by cherished traditional values. For example, it's "family values" that force civil servants to help out a relative even if the request is outright illegal. And while we complain about corrupt politicians, we forget that our feudal system actually requires them to become corrupt: people expect them to pay for everything from baptisms to burials so what's a bit of vote-buying when elections come around?

Transparency International's choice of the term "barometer" is appropriate. A barometer only warns about bad weather. We should look at how we might use those warnings.