Abolishing the PCGG

PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION on Good Government (PCGG) Chair Andres Bautista may have a point. The PCGG may have to be abolished—but only so it can be reorganized so it can do better, and not because the cost of recovering the wealth the late Ferdinand Marcos amassed during his 21 years in power has become prohibitive.

Cost effectiveness has never been, or shouldn’t have been, the primary reason why the  Marcos ill-gotten wealth should be recovered. Although the Corazon Aquino administration founded the PCGG in 1986 to recover and use the people’s money for the people, what primarily made recovering it necessary was to demonstrate that corruption doesn’t pay and will be found out, and the perpetrators punished. Abolishing the PCGG because of the cost of the effort now, in the context of the election to power of an administration pledged to end corruption, would be beyond ironic.

Bautista’s other reason for recommending the abolition of the PCGG is more convincing. That reason is the difficulty, which has been obvious since Imelda Marcos and her children returned to the country in 1991, of recovering the remaining half of the estimated $10 billion Marcos is alleged to have illegally appropriated, given the return and restoration to power of his widow and children.

Imelda Marcos’ being a congresswoman, her daughter Imee Marcos’ being governor of Ilocos Norte and her son Ferdinand Jr.’s being a senator of the Republic, are indicative of how much the family has recovered politically. But they pale in comparison to the very real extent of the influence they command not only in their Northern turfs, but even more tellingly in the consciousness of an entire generation of Filipinos who have never really known, let alone understood, what Ferdinand Marcos did to this country.

It isn’t a matter or forgetfulness but of ignorance. The Marcos name resonates among many Filipinos in the 20-30 age range as belonging to a President whose term was not particularly damaging to the country. What’s worse, however, is that among those who do know that he placed the country under martial rule, Marcos is thought to have exercised an option that they think led to a period of peace and relative prosperity, compared to the poverty, uncertainty, violence and corruption of the horrible present.

This skewed view of the Marcos period, the mass ignorance of the damage it caused this country and its people, and its corresponding translation into voter support, have enabled Imelda Marcos and her children to return to power with minimum effort. The same ignorance has made Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s eventually being President of the Republic a depressing possibility.

But the need to provide the people particularly the younger generation that did not experience martial law with the information they need to know in order to understand the Marcos tyranny, and as a result to support the 30-year effort to recover the wealth Marcos amassed at the expense of this country and its people, does not justify the abolition of the PCGG, least of all the abandonment of the effort to recover the Marcos ill-gotten wealth.

Granted, on the other hand, that the PCGG, which in the past has itself been accused of corruption, has not done the sterling job expected of it given its 30-year history. The Aquino administration can choose to encourage Congress to reorganize it and correct its deficiencies, and even to call it by another name. But the task it has been mandated to do can only be abandoned when it is completed.

Given his reservations about his job, PCGG Chair Bautista should resign. In his place the Aquino administration should appoint someone with a better understanding of why the Commission—whatever the name it will, or could, go by—was organized, the value of its work, and why recovering the Marcos loot is as relevant today as it has been since the Marcos regime was overthrown in 1986.