The limits of post- plunder reform in the Philippines’ oligarchic democracy

Abstract

When Benigno Simeon Aquino III ran for the Philippine presidency in 2010, his platform, ‘A Social Contract with the Filipino People’, highlighted two major agenda items: fighting corruption and reducing poverty. His campaign slogan, ‘If no one is corrupt, no one will be poor!’– encapsulated and linked these two top concerns. After nine years ridden with corruption and fraud scandals under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Aquino’s slogan resonated among many Filipinos, becoming a household catchphrase and helping him win the election by a wide margin. As president, Aquino has embarked on a programme of reforms that hews closely to his electoral platform. He has made good on his campaign pledge to fight corruption. He constituted a Cabinet of predominantly professionaltechnocratic officials, including some reputedly reform-oriented figures, and he has called on those in the public service to follow the ‘straight path’. In line with the call for ‘transparent, accountable and participatory governance’, Aquino and his Cabinet have undertaken such reforms as a more transparent way of preparing the national budget and the adoption of technologies facilitating public disclosure of data. To break the atmosphere of impunity, the Aquino administration has arrested, jailed and prosecuted former top government officials on various malfeasance charges, including Arroyo herself. Incarcerated – under ‘hospital arrest’ as she has been undergoing medical treatment for a bone ailment – she is now being prosecuted on charges of plunder, corruption and electoral fraud. Two close allies of Arroyo, Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez and Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona, both deemed to be too ‘soft’ or partial in cases involving the Arroyo administration, were impeached by the House of Representatives. In April 2011, Gutierrez resigned ten days before the Senate, sitting as an impeachment tribunal, could try her. In May 2012, after a four-month trial that was broadcast live and widely followed, Corona was convicted of betrayal of public trust and culpable violation of the Philippine constitution for failing to disclose to the public his statement of assets, liabilities and net worth as required by law. In national surveys, the Aquino government has generally received high approval ratings in its efforts to fight corruption. Some of Aquino’s reform measures, however, such as those related to rapid and sustained growth and to poverty reduction, have not – or at least notyet – achieved the desired results. In terms of economic growth, Aquino, at least in his first two and a half years in power, has fared much better than his predecessors, but the growth rates have not been consistently high. After surging to 7.6 per cent in 2010, the Philippines’ GDP growth rate dropped to a feeble 3.7 per cent in 2011, then bounced back to 6.6 per cent in 2012, one of the strongest economic growths in Asia last year. Despite massive infusions of funding for a conditional cash transfer programme and other poverty reduction projects, poverty remains widespread, perhaps even worsening. With the seemingly iron-willed determination that the Aquino administration has shown in pursuing its reform agenda, it would appear that the Philippines is now well on the way to recovering from the depredations of the Arroyo period and to addressing the deficiencies in its democracy and rule of law, and may now have a better chance at achieving rapid and sustained growth and reducing poverty. This chapter takes a much more circumspect view. It argues that while the Aquino government has made significant gains in the fight against corruption, it has barely dented the core problem in the Philippines’ oligarchic democracy: entrenched political families that maintain their stranglehold on wealth and power through patronage and various other means and who hamper faster economic development. It argues further that the Philippines has merely reverted from a predatory regime to a clientelist regime and that many of the conditions that gave rise to the politics of plunder under Arroyo and her predecessor President Estrada remain. The challenge for the Aquino government is to prevent the return of the predatory regime by prevailing upon the reformers in the establishment and their allies in civil society to undertake much more thoroughgoing initiatives aimed at combating ingrained cultures of patronage and impunity and strengthening the rule of law.