As the dust settles after the Philippines’ May 10 elections, the political atmosphere retains the stench of nepotism and personality-based politics. But a growing Filipino movement is making sure that, even as the names and faces in power remain the same, the country’s opaque and tightly centralized governance practices continue to change.
Although a new electronic voting system was supposed to help bring more transparency and reliability to the election process, technical glitches threatened to postpone voting; and there’s nothing technology can do to stem the violence and voter-fraud that has traditionally marred Filipino elections. Nor is there anything technology can do to reduce the role of personality and patronage in Filipino politics.
The front-runner and now Filipino President-elect is Benigno “Noy Noy” Aquino, whose personality and experience are lacking but whose mother was the late Corazon Aquino, who in 1986 led the movement that toppled the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and restored electoral democracy to the Philippines. Another candidate is former president Joseph Estrada, who first gained fame as a movie star in several legendary Filipino gangster films. Then there’s Gilberto Teodoro, who besides having outgoing President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo dub him her chosen successor, happens to be Noy Noy Aquino’s cousin. And that’s not all.
As if the whole situation needed a punchline, President Macapagal-Arroyo is running for a seat in congress, a position that would get her one step closer to reforming the constitution and becoming the country’s first Prime Minister.
Even if the upper echelons of Filipino politics weren’t such a stronghold of cronyism and corruption, successfully introducing a renewed culture of good governance requires a strong bottom-up effort from those outside traditional power structures. The private sector can be a powerful force in that regard. The Institute of Corporate Directors (ICD) works with publicly listed Filipino companies to achieve the dual goals of better business performance through improved corporate governance, and greater bargaining power to demand and impart corresponding improvements in public governance.
No matter who is in power, the theory goes, a strong private sector built on transparency and accountability can clearly and consistently demand and impart the same from the public sector. As part of putting that theory into practice, ICD recently released its 5th annual Corporate Governance Scorecard rankings. Stay tuned this month to read more about what ICD has done, and about how the corporate governance movement marries economic performance and political accountability.
ICD (@ICDcenter) is CIPE’s featured partner for May 2010.
Oscar Abello is a CIPE program assistant for global.
Published Date: May 10, 2010