SAMMY JULIAN
THE signs are everywhere: Filipinos have lost trust in the Senate.
Excuse us. What we actually mean is that people have lost all faith in the integrity of the senators, not the actual legislative institution.
Is it not obvious? The public’s cynicism has been stoked by the pork barrel scam involving 25 senators and former senators, 180 congressmen and former congressmen, plus some Cabinet officials.
Well, the slump in trust and confidence is due, above all, to the fact that we now know too much about what some of them actually do: they do not legislate laws, they rob us blind.
Now, they have lost it — that basic sense of integrity as elected leaders of our nation.
Top political analysts have been saying for well over a decade that trust is necessary for a stable government and that prosecuting the criminals is necessary to restore trust. Indeed, as we have repeatedly noted, loss of trust is arguably the main reason we return time and time again to some sort of crisis.
Trust plays a key role in politics. In the absence of trust in a country’s institutions and leaders, political legitimacy breaks down.
Trust does matter; we rely on certain levels of trust to function and prosper.
But the problem is not that people should be more blindly and naively trusting. The problem is that the institutions have to act in a more trustworthy manner.
The essential point is not that people need to be encouraged to trust. Most of us want to trust and have the basic capacity to trust. We need institutions that are trustworthy.
Now all of us think we ought to put many of these guys who stole the people’s money in prison. Absolutely. These are not just petty crimes or little accidents. There were victims. That’s the point. There were victims all over the country: all the taxpayers.
Remember the government-owned and -controlled corporations and all the perks that the officials receive? Well, the government always focuses on the whole notion of incentives.
Well, people have an incentive sometimes to behave badly because they can make more money if they can cheat. If our government is going to work, then we have to make sure that what they gain when they cheat is offset by a system of penalties.
Of course, we all expect charges to be filed and a full-scale investigation and cleaning up of the residue of that scam, before you can have, we think, a return of confidence in the elected government officials, particularly those who occupy seats at the Senate and the House of Representatives. And that’s a process that needs to get under way.
Failure to punish these criminals creates incentives for more crimes and further destruction of our nation in the future.
But to do this, first, the Senate — the Blue Ribbon Committee in particular — should leave the pork scam investigation with the proper courts.
Believe us when we say that you should stick to your mandate.
Mudslinging and partisanship have tainted the halls of the Senate where you conduct your so-called “impartial investigations” in aid of legislation.
No wonder Sen. TG Guingona is 19th in the Pulse Asia Survey. The people are not buying his melodramatic tone of concern considering that he has to preside over an investigation that includes colleagues accused of participating in the embezzlement of billions of pesos from the Priority Development Assistance Fund, or congressional pork barrel.
Helping an individual recover from a traumatic experience provides a useful analogy for understanding how to help the country recover from this pork barrel scam. The public will need to hold the perpetrators responsible and take what actions they can to prevent them from harming the economy again. In addition, the public will have to see proof that government leaders can behave responsibly before they will trust them again.
That is for the future. Now, however, the people are not in the most trusting mood./PN
