The noble and the brave: Essay on corruption

The noble and the brave: Essay on corruption

As an educated person, you would not dare steal blatantly, shop lift from a grocery store, or take anything not intended for your own sake. Political or economic corruption in my own understanding is when public leaders and officials steal a partial amount of money from an allotted budget for certain Economic, and poverty alleviation projects. This moreover changes the situation from ‘worse’ to ‘worst’. When they commit such crime, I just can not seem to process in my mind of how selfish, shameless and cruel are these people. Corruption shows us that million’s of Filipino suffering in poverty results to the satisfaction of one person standing proud. This is while he/she drowns in his/her dirty money, and overflow with ill wealth inside his/her wallet.

According to the poll by Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd., The most corrupted country of Asia is the Philippines [1], and so as the United Nations Development program also claimed that the country manages to corrupt an amount reaching up to $ 2 billion Dollars or roughly 13 % of the annual budget.[2] This researches only show of what kind of disgrace is these officials are giving for our country. It is quite an irony that they promise during elections to eliminate poverty, and yet this polls and studies present of how are we so engulfed into such controversies. And what we need now is people that are willing to uplift the pride of the country by fixing its system.

There are a lot of corruptions going on the country nowadays and the most popular today is the AFP corruption. This issue has been squealed by the COA whistle blower Heidi Mendoza. She exposed the alleged anomalies happening within the armed forces, and because of this, she consistently receives death threats. The action she took was very brave for her part for the reason that she meddles with powerful authorities and personalities of the government. Due to this she was bestowed as the Women of Courage Recognition by women's group Gabriela.[3]

Lt. Col. George Rabusa the former AFP budget officer just like Mendoza, is a whistle blower of the alleged corruption going on in the AFP. He exposed the anomalies of the so called tradition of the AFP wherein a general receives an amount of 50 million pesos as a send off gift aside from the 5 million pesos they got from service every month. The first person to taste defeat was the former chief of staff Angelo Reyes. That in spite of shaming the whole AFP, he decided to take his own life in front of his mother’s grave.

The country has faced a lot of challenges, and there are only a few of Filipinos brave and noble enough to face the cancers of this society. Personally, I hope that more Filipinos will be like Rabusa and Heidi, so that someday without corruption there will be no poverty, like the claim of President P-NOY.


1 Philippines More Corrupt Than Indonesia, Poll Says (Update1), 2007, By Katherine Espina, Bloomberg [online] Available at: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aS1mjWEgmEvw&refer=asia [Accessed 06 March 2011]

2 Ranking of Corruption in Asian Countries, 2007, Asianoffbeat [online] Available at: http://www.asianoffbeat.com/default.asp?Display=844 [Accessed 6 March 2011]

3 COA whistleblower Heidi Mendoza named Woman of Courage, 2011, By Atom Araullo, ABS-CBN news [online] Available at: http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/lifestyle/02/23/11/coa-whistleblower-heidi-mendoza-named-woman-courage, [Accessed 6 March 2011]