Inherently corrupt

I grew up in the part of Paco near the boundary with Pandacan. My Dad and I take the Pandacan bus going to Echague in Quiapo where I board a JD bus to UP Diliman while my Dad takes a jeepney going to Dapitan that passes by UST where he was a professor of Medicine.

- BOO CHANCO

Sometimes, interesting conversations crop up on the Pandacan bus. One time, the driver was loudly proclaiming the hopelessness of Filipinos. We should all be annihilated by an atomic bomb, he said, because we are hopeless.

Maybe what pissed him off was a usual encounter with traffic cops with his conductor paying "tribute." Street-based corruption or kotongan is a normal daily occurrence but it probably was getting into his system and he needed to voice out his frustration.

Corruption had been in the headlines lately and there were expressions of shock at the amount of money being stolen in the Great DPWH Flood Control Robbery. People knew that corruption existed but were dumbfounded by the systematic plunder by congressmen, senators, contractors, DPWH district engineers.

We took it for granted that the quality of public works projects is low due to the practice of sharing a budget allocation. It started with 20 percent being divided "by the boys" but now, BBM found out there is a prevalence of ghost projects which means 100 percent of a budget allocation is shared by the crooks with nothing left for the project.

So, BBM faces the challenge of dealing with massive corruption. Is he up to it? Are we inherently corrupt as a people? Some sociologists trace that back to colonial times.

Raymund Narag, a PhD, posted on Facebook what he called the Catechism of Corruption. It reads like a tongue-in-cheek guide for anyone sleazy enough to wade in the mud of corruption at DPWH.