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Asia's Anti-Graft Center

A regional integrity center to open in Manila

Director Alex Brillantes It is widely accepted that corruption leads to poverty
Photo by Eric Sales

Corruption undermines the rule of law, exacerbates poverty, and can even end lives. Its deadlier results can be seen in the recent tainted milk scandal that affected dairy consumers across the People’s Republic of China and worldwide—a disaster that many are blaming on local graft and poorly enforced food safety standards.

Developed nations are far from immune from poor governance. Transparency International chided advanced economies, notably in Europe, for their “double standards” and sliding ratings in its report on the 2008 international anticorruption scale or Corruption Perceptions Index. The questionable role of money in politics, amid foreign bribery scandals, “indicates a broader failure by the world’s wealthiest countries to live up to the promise of mutual accountability in the fight against corruption,” says the Transparency International report.

The Asia and Pacific region has countries like Singapore—with the best ratings—trading and interacting with countries that are perceived to be among the most corrupt. Can integrity be taught effectively, and transparency and accountability learned in such a diverse region?

A group of academics and public administration experts from around the region believes the answer is “yes.”

Starting next year, at a new regional anti-graft institute, Asian public servants on the frontline of the “corruption wars” will be trained to identify and tackle corrupt systems.

The Center for Asian Integrity, based in Manila, will be a first for Asia, promoting “integrity and accountability building of public personnel and anticorruption advocates.”

Courses are due to begin in early 2009, with Philippines bureaucrats and their counterparts in Asia invited to enroll.

According to the center’s director, Alex Brillantes, dean of the University of the Philippines National College of Public Administration and Governance, corruption courses will be strongly linked to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals.

“It is widely accepted that corruption leads to poverty. When you put public money in the pockets of the few, it deprives the rest of the people of basic needs such as health care, education, and infrastructure, including public transport and roads,” says Brillantes. “With the new Center for Asian Integrity, we will be developing and implementing new anticorruption strategies for the region.”

The initiative is being driven by Australia’s Institute for Governance, Ethics and Law, based at Griffith University, the Queensland University of Technology, and the United Nations University. Some funding is coming from the United States Agency for International Development and the Australian Agency for International Development, with support from the World Bank and the backing of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

In Manila, the office of the Philippines Ombudsman is behind the project, which will be run out of the University of the Philippines National College of Public Administration and Governance.

Why base the center in the Philippines, birthplace of the late President Ferdinand Marcos? Almost 20 years after his death, this archipelagic nation still struggles more than many of its neighbors to beat institutionalized corruption. Recent scandals include allegations of millions of dollars in kickbacks as part of the awarding of a government broadband contract to a state-owned company of the People’s Republic of China.

Brillantes retorts: “Why not in the Philippines? It is not like we can pretend that there isn’t corruption. Whether we are high or low on the corruption scale, corruption has been here since well before Marcos’s time. And it is a problem across Asia.”

In Singapore, authorities tackled corruption in the bureaucracy and the executive ranks by significantly increasing the salaries of public servants and politicians, reducing the incentive to accept bribes.

But such an approach is impractical for poorer and vastly more populous nations such as the Philippines, Viet Nam, Indonesia, or India.

An alternative advocated by Brillantes is the wholesale smashing of the politicized bureaucracy.

This can be done only through systemic change. In the Philippines, for example, the President can directly appoint thousands of bureaucrats, giving the head of state more direct power than many counterparts in larger nations such as the United States. If the number of political appointments were far lower, the resulting pressure for “favors” and “sweetheart deals” as well as outright bribery could be drastically reduced.

Although the focus of the new center will be on developing countries, Professor Charles Sampford, head of the Institute for Ethics, Governance and Law, says that developed nations such as Australia, Singapore, and Japan have little cause for complacency when it comes to governance.

“The problems of corruption are similar everywhere,” he says. “It is about abuse of power for non-authorized purposes for private gain or for political party gain. In tackling corruption, it is not just prosecuting individuals that matters. The goal is to smash the system so that it is no longer intact and is incapable of functioning.”

Sampford cites the case of the Australian state of Queensland in the 1980s, when graft was on a par with the more corrupt regimes in Asia.

Despite becoming a national and international “ethical and governance joke,” Queensland rebuilt its reputation with a groundbreaking judicial inquiry. The lengthy Fitzgerald inquiry researched and uncovered a wholesale system of corruption from the lowliest police office up to the premier. The graft system was “so exposed that it was shattered and couldn’t be reconstituted,” says Sampford.

He is adamant that placing the new Center for Asian Integrity in Manila is not “picking on the Philippines.” He says, “The history of the center’s origins do not involve either an empirical or value judgment about whether the Philippines rates lowly on the perceptions index. The integrity center could have been placed in any one of a number of cities. Willingness to do something is the most important attribute—as we saw with the example of Queensland.” •

Source: Transparency International