No sympathy for whistleblowers

IN SPITE of the potentially big push they could give the effort against the perpetual plague of official corruption, whistleblowers don’t find any encouragement where it matters. For all its vociferous avowals on corruption, not even the present government is impressed.

Not even by a Rodolfo Lozada, who definitely is not your ordinary whistleblower; he may well have in fact set the standard for whistleblowing, less because he blew the loudest than because his blowing was attended by the most dramatic of circumstances, to wit:

One, he told on a government that stank of scandal so badly it has inspired comparisons with the heretofore singular Marcos dictatorship.

Two, an insider and confessed party to some of the regularities himself, he came forward without any deals for reward or leniency, thus investing himself with high credibility. Indeed, no manner of intimidation, not even kidnapping, could stop him. On the contrary, it was he who, by the popular outrage his whistleblowing provoked, frustrated his intimidators by stopping the rotten deal they were making. If the deal had gone through, one with a Chinese state company for a nationwide computerization program, it would have gone into the annals of corruption as the biggest case of overpricing and bribery — actually some bribes had already changed hands.

Third, the revelations resonated so widely with the electorate they doubtless contributed to the opposition victory in the last presidential polls.

In fact it was from his whistleblowing that Lozada built a relationship with former President Cory Aquino and her son — she who promptly picked up his cause, and he who carried on after her death, vowing even to propose a law supporting whistleblowers upon his own accession to the presidency.

Alas, halfway through his presidency, Noynoy dropped Lozada. Why?

I could think of two perspectives from which answers may be ventured. One may be personal and rather petty, but it is all the same worth exploring for what it might reveal about the president’s character. The other is so profoundly cultural it betrays the fraternization that goes on in politics at the expense of the public good.

Lozada asked to see the president after government agents had come to arrest him — as it happened, he was away — on a charge of which he was being informed for the first time and for which the chief testimony was coming from an official retained from the very administration he had blown the whistle on.

“I felt I was being harassed, so I went to see the president and asked for whatever he could do to ensure fair play,” said Lozada.

But somehow taking it that Lozada was asking for undue intervention, not mere fair help, the president replied that all he could duly do was “pardon or commute” the sentence in the event of conviction, itself a curious and not so sympathetic prognosis. (He did not say what to him precisely constitutes “undue intervention,” although putting up bail for the accused Grace Padaca, without her having to ask for it, presumably does not. Padaca is now an election commissioner — by his grace as well.)

Even more curiously, the president brought up the rejection of an offer he had made as a candidate for the presidency to protect Lozada when he returned from Hong Kong, where he had gone for a moment’s refuge to search his conscience for the right thing to do. There, at the airport, the future president waited to take him away to safety, only to be turned down in favor of the sanctuary offered by the religious. Since coming forward Lozada has lived a secluded life with his family among the La Salle brothers in their campus quarters in Greenhills, San Juan, resigned, he says, to what fate shall deal him.

Apparently, the rejection festered.

The exchange quoted or otherwise cited here all took place in Malacañang and has been validated by parties on both sides of it. It has been carried on in the media, with the president’s side harping mostly on the supposed impropriety Lozada committed when he came asking for the president’s help and with Lozada, for his part, citing a conspiracy among operators from the previous regime who have managed to plant themselves in the present one to get back at him.

In the meantime, missed for all the trees is the forest — the big picture, which involves a far-longer-running conspiracy, an operating culture, as it were, that binds the political class and stops it from passing a law that protects whistleblowers or a law that commands public officials to reveal their financial circumstances among others (Freedom of Information Act) or any other law that targets the wealthy and powerful.

What chance of fair play, indeed, do the likes of Jun Lozada have in such a culture?

Reproduced from today’s issue of BusinessWorld, of which the writer is the publisher.