War vs corruption, poverty interlinked

Is the Aquino administration focusing too much on running after the corrupt that it has neglected raising the lot of the poor?

That seems to be the perception of the recent three-day “summit on poverty, inequality and social reform,” attended by more than 200 representatives of farmers, labor, fishermen, indigenous peoples, Church people, urban dwellers and civil-society organizations.

Archbishop Antonio Lagdameo warned that “our nation is in an explosive situation….The children of the poor wake up to poverty, eat poverty for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and sleep poverty—without understanding why they are such. There is a proliferation of poor households erected right on the bangketas, above the esteros, under bridges, in the karitons on the hillsides and even in the cemeteries. Overcoming poverty requires the decisive reform leadership from the center. We, therefore, call on the President to refocus the whole governance system in support of the aspirations of the poor.”

For his part, Christian S. Monsod, former chairman of the Commission on Elections and member of the 1987 Constitutional Commission, said: “The task today is no less heroic than at Edsa—it is liberation from the yoke of poverty that would make democracy more meaningful to the poor…It is not only guns that kill. Poverty kills. It is slow death from hunger, from diseases that we thought no longer existed, from the loneliness of a life with an empty future. It is also the dying of dignity.”

Indeed, the nation has been unable to make significant dent in fighting poverty and inequality, the summit participants pointed out, with the top 1 percent of the families having an income equal to the income of the bottom 30 percent of poor families numbering 5.5 million.

“There is something very wrong about the great imbalances and the use of these advantages to influence the politics and policies for their own interests or deny or delay justice to the 99 percent of our country,” they said. “This must change.”

They are right.

The perception that the war against poverty has taken a back seat to the Aquino administration’s anti-corruption campaign may be valid to a certain extent. But from another perspective, President Aquino’s resolve to prosecute his predecessor for electoral sabotage and corruption may just be what the doctor ordered.

Political will to stamp out corruption is precisely what’s needed to stimulate the economy and create jobs—and minimize poverty.

And what better way to demonstrate political will than to send to jail someone who stands accused of plunder, electoral fraud and human- rights violations.

Every administration has promised to stamp out corruption and poverty in this country. But more often than not, the rhetoric has not been matched by real results.

The anti-poverty and anti-corruption campaigns are mutually reinforcing, rather than mutually exclusive.

The war against corruption will result in taxpayers’ money going to where it rightfully should: in vital infrastructure projects and social services, particularly for the poor and the disadvantaged.

With already scarce resources put to good use rather than diverted to the pockets of the greedy, the war against poverty can proceed at a rapid pace.

The test of good government is not just to put the corrupt in jail, but to ensure that taxpayers’ money really goes to creating jobs and helping the poor improve their standards of living.

The impatience of the basic sectors, the Church and civil-society groups for results in the war against poverty is understandable. That should be the challenge for the Aquino administration—to show that it can really deliver results in both the war against corruption and the war against poverty by the time it leaves office in 2016.