Distrust

It's always such a fruitful experience to meet people like Sir Vlad who seem to draw out insights you wouldn't think about on your own.

My meeting him and talking to him about my current adventures in Ateneo made me realize how rich a source of insight my Sanggu experience is in understanding how the government works in the Philippines.

The cool thing about the Sanggunian and its place in the Ateneo community is very much like that of the Philippine government in the country. The structure of the Sanggunian is very much the same as in the real government, only the positions have different names. The Sanggunian, like the national government, functions because of the taxes of the people (in our case, the student activities fund paid as part of the tuition). There so many more parallelisms but they are not the focus of this entry.

What I want to focus on is how do you make a government work effectively and efficiently? Is corruption really the major problem faced internally by the current administration? From my experience in the Sanggunian, I don't think so. The Sanggunian officers, at the very least, are not corrupt (yes, Gadfly will agree as well), precisely because we have a very tight auditing office and the system will simply not allow it. Are the Sanggunian officers incompetent? I don't think so either because most of us are very active and successful in other places like student organizations, outside organizations, non-government organizations and other types of groups. Is it a problem of structure? Maybe but to me I think there is a deeper problem.

I guess my experience in the Sanggunian tells me that corruption is not the only problem and perhaps not even the biggest. I feel that the problem is what corruption breeds - distrust. It is when the people lose confidence in their leaders that authority is crippled. No matter how great a leader is in so many aspects, the people will not see it because of the cataract of distrust placed there by corruption. I feel it is a problem not only of the leaders but of the people as well. It practically cuts off the ties of between leader and people.

I have no idea where the distrust (or perhaps indifference is a better term) toward the Sanggunian comes from. I came into the institution without knowing that this was the situation. But what I do know is that it is a problem that has to be mutually solved by the officers and their consituents. No matter how hard the officers work, if the people refuse to see that, then nothing will come out of it. The people have the responsibility to be vigilant of those they elected because no one else will. If they remain distrustful to the point of indifference, then nothing good will happen for the entire community. I would rather see angry and revolting constituents - at least they know something's wrong and they want to do something about it.

In the context of the national government, this is, I believe, is more applicable. Despite the strength of the macro-economic indicators, the infrastructure projects and other achievements of this administration, a single wrongdoing not even of the highest official erases all of these in the eyes of the people. The greatest weapon against an institution is distrust. This is why terrorism and corruption are powerful. They make people lose trust in the institutions that are supposed to combat both. Although technically the government has not lost the war on terrorism or corruption, both are gradually winning the hearts and minds of people. Both are cultivating the destructive seeds of fear and distrust. Not agreeing to the leaders of the government is one thing. Distrusting the capacity of government to serve the people is another.

The signs of how distrustful the people have become are very obvious. The Human Security Act, the Cybereducation project, the JPEPA. All these are lightning rod issues that are not difficult to resolve if the people trust the government (and if the government is deserving of the trust i.e. they are doing the right thing).

If the government wants genuine progress in our nation, it has to realize that trust is an integral part of it and that it must take concrete steps to win back the trust of the people. I know the Sanggunian is doing just that.