The war on corruption being waged in the Philippines is older than the oldest Filipino alive today. It was one of the cancers that Jose Rizal sought to lay bare before the temple in his novel Noli Me Tangere. Most attempts to build on the literary tradition that Rizal started would always feature corruption as among the main ills of Philippine society.

Corruption is as familiar to Filipinos as the policeman on the street who allows vehicles to park where they should not in exchange for a daily fee, or the government clerk who would put the papers of a bribe-giver on top of those for the signature of the next official.

The more complex deals involving millions or even billions, Filipinos only get to hear about when the media discover and expose them.

This is true in the case of former Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) comptroller Gen. Carlos Garcia, whom his wife unintentionally revealed to have amassed large properties through wealth obtained from the rampant practice of conversion. This is true in the case of the almost-daily unfolding of the most shocking details behind the so-called fertilizer scam, for instance, in which funds for fertilizers were distributed to congressmen during the harvest season and not a single centavo reached the hands of their constituents.

Corruption has always been a major issue in Philippine electoral jousts. It has been said that one of the most effective ways to demolish your political opponents would be to accuse them of engaging in corrupt practices. Indeed, debates between candidates are not real debates, are not intellectual exchanges on the issues of the day: they are mudslinging contests where each party accuses the other of thievery.

“What are we in power for?” Sen. Jose Avelino asked in the early 1950s, and received a lot of flak from his political opponents.

“What is wrong with a man providing for the future of his family?” President Carlos P. Garcia asked in the late 1950s, and suffered Avelino’s fate.

In 1986, the Filipino people through a popular uprising ousted a President who would eventually land in The Guinness Book of World Records as the largest thief: Ferdinand Marcos. But those who came after Marcos would invariably be at the receiving end of corruption charges.

Corazon Aquino had her “Kamag-anak Incorporated” and Fidel V. Ramos would be known for signing onerous contracts left and right. Joseph Estrada would himself be ousted in 2001 in another popular uprising, largely against corruption.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who replaced Estrada on the heels of the 2001 uprising, would herself have her name mentioned in relation to no less than ten major corruption scandals: from the overprice in the construction of the President Diosdado Macapagal Avenue to the PIATCO controversy. She was proclaimed as the winner of the 2004 presidential election, and yet she is hounded by persistent allegations that she used government funds to prop up her electoral bid.

Rizal has been dead for a long time and so have been many of those men of letters who could be rightfully classified as heirs to his legacy of social realist writing, but corruption remains a festering cancer in Philippine society.

In fact, over the passage of time, we would find corruption worsening rather than lessening. In the most recent surveys by international institutions, the Philippines has invariably emerged as among the most corrupt countries in the world. One survey by a group of international businessmen places the Philippines at No. 2 in the list of the world’s most corrupt countries.

How win the war against corruption? Crucial to providing the answer to the question is another question – that of how we view corruption.

For traditional politicians, corruption is a permanent fixture of politics and governance that is addressed simply by new mechanisms, new laws, and improved public image of government officials and agencies.

For the most part, ordinary people are easily agitated when someone in authority uses his or her position to get rich at other people’s expense. They consider it unconscionable that a public official flaunts his/her ill-gotten wealth while the majority of people wallow in poverty, social services are neglected and development projects are put on hold.

Other lobby groups look at corruption as a problem of governance. Notably, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) propagate this notion that corruption flourishes due to the lack of mechanisms for transparency and accountability in the running of governments.

Still others abhor corruption on moral, political and economic grounds. They see the connection between the phenomenon of corruption in public office, economic iniquities, and social injustice.They look beyond organizational solutions in addressing the problem of corruption. They see corruption as systemic in a neocolonial state controlled by domestic elite whose interests are dictated by and intertwined with those of foreign big business. They consider institutionalized corruption, patronage politics and feudal agrarian relations as inseparably linked.

A critical view is that corruption arises because the state is treated as one big business enterprise for extracting profit. It is a phenomenon inherent in a political system where the concept and practice of governance revolve around how political leaders and top bureaucrats, in collaboration with vested interests, abuse their positions of power to amass wealth at the expense of real public service and of promoting the welfare of the greater majority who are marginalized and poor.

The war on corruption has taken and is still taking various forms, attacking at various aspects of the problem. Campaigns against corrupt public officials have led to electoral defeats and even popular uprisings. But the fact that corruption remains a festering cancer in Philippine society proves that the problem is of a systemic nature.

Only by looking to solutions that go beyond personalities and forms of government can there be a real possibility of winning the war against corruption. What we need is a thorough-going social and cultural transformation until we see public service NOT as a business enterprise and an opportunity to amass personal wealth but as a whole process of empowering the greater majority of our people who are hitherto marginalized and poor.