“I DID NOT invent corruption. I just walked into it.”
These were the last words of General Angelo Tomas Reyes, former Armed Forces chief of staff and Defense secretary, before he shot himself to death at his mother’s grave in a cemetery on February 11, 2011.
He had been accused of receiving PhP50 million in “send-off” money when he retired, supposedly a military tradition. He attended one, but not subsequent, hearings of the Senate and the House of Representatives where, he had been warned, delicate details about him, his family, and his colleagues would be brought up.
In life a proud, multi-awarded officer, in death Reyes chose to leave with honor. It was an apparent hara kiri, also called seppuku, a form of a “ritualistic suicide” that samurais committed eons ago in Japan “to preserve honor, restore family honor, or atone for wrongdoing.” Later literature would hail the ritual as a testament to “the nobility of failure.”
Today the trading of mud between those who accuse, investigate, and claim corruption in flood control and other projects in the Philippines has become ritualistic, too.
Just a few admit, and more rant about, the corruption, silent and evasive though about how they pushed, enabled, and played it. Pass the blame, deny any part in the wrongdoing, eschew getting any share from the spoils, preserve claimed honor — it’s our ritualistic name-and-shame game that we might call the failure of nobility.
In the circle of corruption, pushers, enablers, and players abound. Those inside and outside the government are gaming the system, assisted or triggered by incompetence, negligence, ambition, greed, or all these in a bundle.
Flood-control projects that are ghost or bad, kickbacks and commissions fleeced off contracts, are a series of acts of many, and involve not just one or a few persons and agencies.
Download full report here: Crooks Incorporated@PH: Pushers, Enablers, Players Gaming the System in Band