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“The lust of gold succeeds the rage of conquest; the
lust of gold, unfeeling and remorseless! The last
corruption of degenerate man.”
—Samuel
Johnson, Irene (Act I, Section 1)
THE
overpriced
Diosdado Macapagal Highway,
also called the “road to perdition.” The controversial
Northrail project. The NBN-ZTE and the cyber-education
project (CEP). What are the bottom-line issues in all
these government projects? Corruption and lack of
transparency. And, as usual, the people who are going to
pay for all these projects with their taxes, their
hard-earned money, are the last to know.
Just the
other day, the World Bank (WB) “deferred” the
implementation of a multimillion-dollar loan to the
Philippines supposedly for “phase two” of the National
Roads Improvement and Management Program (NRIMP) due to
supposed corruption, specifically collusion and
overpricing.
“Signs
of procurement problems in the first phase of the
program were identified. Between 2003 and 2006, the
World Bank rejected two large road contracts in three
successive rounds of bidding because of strong signs of
collusion and excessive pricing,” said the World Bank,
explaining its decision.
Here we
go again! It seems the Philippine government can’t learn
from its mistakes. It’s another national embarrassment
that wouldn’t help our image as a nation—whatever is
left of it—abroad. Do we wonder why Transparency
International now considers us as among the most corrupt
countries of the world?
In
fairness, the Philippine government is saying the World
Bank is the one to blame for insisting on its own
“flawed public-procurement system” that is not tailored
to the Philippine context. “That would not have
happened had the World Bank not insisted on choosing its
own system,” said Rolando Andaya, the Philippine budget
secretary.
The
problem, Mr. Andaya explained, lies with the fact that
the World Bank supposedly allows bids higher than the
indicated amount as against the Philippine approach,
which only takes in bids lower than the indicated
amount. “Now they are blaming us for something that they
themselves insisted on adopting,” he said.
Andaya
probably has a point there, but the truth is that the
supposed collusion and overpricing happened within our
borders. And given our recent experience with the
NBN-CEP deals with the Chinese— where the government,
specifically the National Economic and Development
Authority, gave the go-ahead to projects that didn’t go
through a bidding process—we are inclined to give more
weight to the view from the WB.
Indeed,
the World Bank actually expressed concern that the
project could be vulnerable to corruption. In a project
document prepared for the NRIMP, the bank, on “lessons
learned” regarding the project, said: “The nature and
political economy of corruption in the
Philippines
cuts through sectors and levels of bureaucracy, and
bypasses preemption and law enforcement sanctions.
National procurement has, at times, been affected by
collusion and bid-rigging, with high payoff margins
until bid ceilings were imposed.”
The WB
document adds: “This has also affected foreign-assisted
projects, where a bid ceiling is usually not permitted
by international financing institutions, but corrective
measures to date require further strengthening to be
effective.”
Among
the corrective measures suggested are the following:
§
Independent procurement assessment and technical audit
that strengthens transparency of the bidding process;
§
Enhanced
processes for procurement, financial management,
internal controls and audits of the road-management
agencies; and
§
Inclusion of a new and innovative coalition of citizen
and road-user groups called Road Watch in the
project-management setup. Road Watch will monitor
project implementation and procurement and issue
periodic report cards on the performance of the road
sector.
Apparently, all these proposed measures have yet to
materialize. That’s probably among the reasons we have
another scandal in our midst.
Certainly, we need to speed up the implementation of
these reforms, including the idea of including in the
governance-procurement board the presence of the
Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines and the
Makati Business Club. And if these measures could be put
right down to the provincial and municipal levels, they
would surely make a difference.
What’s
happening right now is another reflection of the utter
lack of transparency in the country’s public-procurement
system. And this is because despite all our pretensions
to democracy and social openness, we have yet to enact
“sunshine laws” like the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
that would allow citizens and media access to all
government documents and reports.
New
democracies that emerged since the fall of the Berlin
Wall immediately enacted sunshine laws to address
corruption in their societies. We failed to do the same
after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship, despite
several attempts. This time we should have all these
sunshine laws to stop these continuing tales of
corruption in high places that have pervaded every fiber
of our society.
The
reason we can’t bring legislators to enact a FOIA is
that there seems to be no widespread clamor for it. If
we could muster the forces of academe, media, law
groups, chambers of commerce, religious organizations
and civil-society organizations, legislators and policy-
makers would be forced to listen. |
